


Leopard's Choice

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Choices [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Gen, Goblins, Politics, Present Tense, Pureblood Bigotry, Slytherin Harry Potter, Vampires, Violence, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:53:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 39,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25251922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: Sequel to Wolf’s Choice. Harry enters his fifth year with the Ministry demanding he retract his stories of Voldemort’s return, his allies demanding sacrifices he may not want to make, and the world becoming sharper with every breath.
Relationships: Daphne Greengrass & Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy & Harry Potter, Harry Potter & Blaise Zabini, Harry Potter & Severus Snape, Hermione Granger & Harry Potter & Ron Weasley, Sirius Black & Harry Potter, Theodore Nott & Harry Potter
Series: Choices [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1078446
Comments: 387
Kudos: 921





	1. Web of Alliances

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to _Other People’s Choices_ and _Wolf’s Choice,_ and the third part of the Choices series. Seriously, don’t try to read this without having read the other stories first. I anticipate this being 60 chapters, like the others in the series. Also, please take the violence warning seriously. Like OoTP, this fic will get considerably darker than the others. The R rating is for violence.

_Chapter One—Web of Alliances_

“Hello, Ms. Greengrass, Mr. Nott, Ms. Selwyn. _”_

Harry has been on edge ever since Sirius told him who he would be meeting. He supposes it could be worse if this Ms. Greengrass was Astoria and Daphne’s mother and this Mr. Nott was Theo’s father, but “it could be worse” isn’t comforting right now.

The three adult wizards are all staring at him. Mr. Nott has a thin face that doesn’t look much like Theo’s, but then, he’s some kind of distant cousin. Adele Greengrass is Astoria and Daphne’s aunt, and she has brilliant violet eyes that are narrow as hell. Hecuba Selwyn is the one who stands up and walks towards him. Harry blinked. On the chair behind the table, she looked taller than him, but she’s about the same height.

“Yes, I’ve been this tall since I was sixteen.” Selwyn studies him from up close. Harry unfocuses his eyes when she looks into them, and concentrates on her cheekbone. His mind is still so chaotic that it’s hard for him to master Occlumency, but at least he knows how not to make it easy for people to read his mind.

Selwyn cackles and pats him on the shoulder. “That’s a good start, young man.” Harry bites his tongue against the urge to ask if she’s read his mind. She’s probably just guessing. Selwyn turns to Sirius, who’s lounging against the doorframe from the dining room into the entrance hall. “He has so far met my expectations.”

“But not mine,” Greengrass says, standing. “I want to look at him. And I want you to tell me how you know my nieces, Mr. Potter. I got a distressed letter from their father saying that they aren’t coming home for the summer.”

“They didn’t feel safe,” Harry says, turning to Greengrass. She, unlike Selwyn, is a lot taller than him, and she has blonde hair that falls down her shoulders. He wonders if that’s to make some kind of point. He doesn’t know what it is, if so. “And they received a letter from their mother telling them not to come home at all if they don’t do it in the next two weeks. So I kind of think they had reason.”

“Their father is not their mother.”

“Maybe he should speak up against his wife, then.”

Greengrass freezes with wide eyes. Harry stares back. He didn’t expect that. What in the world did she want him to say? Or why is what he said so startling?

Greengrass doesn’t seem inclined to say more, so Nott clears his throat noisily. “And I want to know why he is helping my cousin Theo and not my cousin Tarquinius. Tarquinius is by far the more powerful ally.”

“Theo is my friend,” Harry says simply. “Tarquinius never gave any indication that he wanted to be.”

“But you shouldn’t rely on personal connections. You should rely on power and who can aid you, and whose aid won’t cost you too much in favors.”

“What a cold way of looking at it.” Harry gets a frown from Nott for that, but he doesn’t freeze like Greengrass, so Harry keeps talking. “But Theo is loyal, and that counts for me more than power. I can’t trust Tarquinius at my back. If you want to join us, that’s fine, but you’re going to have to commit to our cause, and not undermine one of my best friends.”

Nott sniffs, but says no more. Greengrass cuts in, though, apparently over her freezing fit. “And does the same thing apply to me? You would want me to support my nieces, and not my brother? Not my sister-in-law?”

“You don’t have to act like their mother,” Harry snaps. “You would have to make sure that you’re not picking at them and telling them they’re wrong all the time, sure.”

“Harry,” Sirius warns gently.

“It’s only the truth,” Harry says. “I won’t expect them to act like my friends’ parents, or my best friends. But if they undermine me, or they go around telling my friends that they’re ungrateful or brats or weak, there’s no reason to make them allies.”

Selwyn cackles. “What do you say to me, young man, who has no relatives in your group of friends?”

“I’m sure that you have some. Some people have told me that all pure-bloods are intermarried.”

“Say that I have none as close. And don’t sound like you’re trying to avoid my question.”

Harry meets her eyes. Despite Greengrass’s bluster and Nott’s sharp tone, this is where the real danger lies, he’s sure. Selwyn smiles, but she smiles like a dragon.

Harry breathes through the sharp pain in the center of his chest at the reminder of Chaos. He’s going to have to live with it, burn it, transform it into fuel for his fight.

“I say that you’re welcome as my ally on the same premise,” he says. “If you fight beside me, if you’re loyal to the cause, if you don’t undermine my allies.”

Selwyn considers him. “I might need more return than my loyalty.”

Harry shrugs a little. “I don’t know how many Galleons would make the difference to you.”

There’s a slight gasp off to the side, but Harry doesn’t look away from Selwyn to see who made it. He thinks it’s Greengrass, though. And the chuckle that doesn’t bother to hide itself is definitely Sirius.

“Do you know that it’s an insult to offer money to someone like me?”

“A pure-blood?” Harry asks. This isn’t something he’s heard, although admittedly, he hasn’t made etiquette as much of a study as defensive spells. “Why?”

“No. Someone who prides herself on being human.” Selwyn leans towards him, so close to his eye-level that it’s unnerving. “Many people would say that being offered money is an insult because it compares them to goblins, who can be bought off.”

Harry shrugs again. “I never heard that, and I didn’t mean that. And if you’re so proud about being human and different from goblins, what are you going to do if we ally with the goblins? With my godfather’s friend, who’s a werewolf? It doesn’t sound like you really want to be here or you really want to be convinced to be my ally.”

“Harry,” Sirius begins, even though he told Harry when he entered the room that he would be on his own.

“You will not make allies of the goblins,” Nott says, as if lecturing Harry on Astronomy. “They’ve been neutral for centuries.”

“You are not making your alliance attractive,” Selwyn murmurs.

Harry rubs his forehead. He has a headache. He doesn’t want to be here trying to maneuver among these people who are going to criticize him no matter what he does and who think their parents make him special.

“It’s a small alliance,” he says quietly. “I know that most people aren’t going to fight Voldemort no matter what. I don’t think they’ll join him,” he adds, because Selwyn is opening her mouth as if to object to the characterization. “I think they’ll cower in their houses the way they did during the first war, and wait for me to save them. I’m going to do it. But I’m not going to go out of my way to worry about whether I’m making my alliance _attractive_ to people. I won’t change the whole core of who I am and suppress my friends so you can feel that way. And I won’t stop trying to make allies with people you disapprove of. That’s why we’re allies in the first place, and not friends. If you can’t work with goblins or werewolves or my friends, go away.”

There’s a flat slapping sound behind him that’s probably Sirius putting his hand over his face. Harry doesn’t care. He holds Selwyn’s gaze, and waits.

This is an alliance that has to be at least partially on his terms, or his godfather would just have made alliances with the adult wizards and left Harry out of it.

Selwyn finally gives a light chuckle. “I have to admit that you are at least intriguing. Yes, for now I will help.” She gives him a look that reminds Harry of the one he got from a vampire in Diagon Alley last summer. “In a month, we will revisit this conversation and see if you can come up with some other reason I should work with you.”

Harry supposes he should make some gracious speech, but he doesn’t know how to. He nods to her, says, “Thanks,” and then turns to face Greengrass and Nott.

Nott studies him and asks, “Why are you not allied with my cousin Tarquinius?”

“At least until recently, he wanted to kill my friend Theo.”

Nott blinks. “I’m sure you’re mistaken. No pure-blood would want to kill the only heir of his family.”

“He thinks he’s going to have more.” Harry has to admit that he’s not sure what’s going on with Theo’s stepmother and whether she’s really pregnant or not, but that’s something he’ll talk to Theo about privately. No need to hash it out in front of these people who aren’t even allies yet.

“I see.” Nott taps his foot, in an expensive dragon-hide boot, on the floor. Harry forces himself to stare at the boot and not choke up the way he usually does when he’s reminded of Chaos. She would want him to _survive._

“Then I’m in for now,” Nott says abruptly. “I request the ability to reevaluate the alliance in a month’s time, the same way as Hecuba did.”

“Fine,” Harry mutters. Greengrass is the only one left, and from the way her arms are folded and she’s standing a little way back, he thinks he knows what her decision will be.

But she surprises him. “I would not be one of those who cowers in their house when the Dark Lord draws near,” she says, her face cool. “It is unfair to say so.”

Harry holds back a laugh. He stung her pride, somehow. Maybe it’s a family trait? He knows that Daphne gets very offended, sometimes, with the pride situation.

“And for that, you’re going to join our alliance?” Sirius sounds skeptical. Maybe he thought Greengrass was about to back out, too.

“I would not have it said I was a coward.” Greengrass nods and reaches into her pocket for her wand. Harry can’t help tensing and watching it, but he doesn’t reach for his own. If she really does curse him, he can retaliate with wandless magic. “And I will do better than those who make temporary one-month alliances. I will swear allegiance to you for the duration of one year.”

Harry blinks, perplexed, especially because Greengrass wants to swear allegiance to _him_ instead of the cause of defeating Voldemort or something. But then he sees the gleam in her eyes as she kneels down, and understands.

She thinks she can control him because he’s so young and he should be grateful for her loyalty. Harry tightens his resolve and asks, “Do you want me to draw my wand, or do this with my wandless magic?”

Nott takes a step back. Selwyn has no outwards reaction, but Greengrass blinks. “You can cast a binding oath with that?”

Harry hides a wince, wondering if he should have mentioned it. Severus has been telling him to keep it to himself, that it’s too great an advantage not to do so, but on the other hand, if he wants to impress people, he thinks he needs to tell them about it sooner or later.

So he meets Greengrass’s eyes and nods. “Which one do you want me to make the oath with?”

“Your wandless magic.” Greengrass’s eyes are a little big. Harry’s not sure if she’s feeling fear or excitement, but he thinks either one might help the alliance.

Harry closes his eyes and concentrates, and the pearly glow that he imagines rising behind his eyelids when he uses his wandless magic is there in seconds, surrounding his hands and belly. He hears Greengrass give a shaky gasp.

When Harry opens his eyes, the glow is actually there. He hopes that he conceals his own jump. He’s never tried to call pure wandless magic before, so that’s probably why the difference. He always called it to use in a spell right away.

“That—will do,” Greengrass says, and leans over until the tip of her wand touches his right ring finger. “I promise, Harry Potter, that I will be faithful to your alliance, your cause, your allies, and you until a year and a day passes.”

That seems to be more than the year she promised the first time, but Harry isn’t going to mention that. He clenches his magic down around the tip of her wand and says, “I promise, Adele Greengrass, that I will be faithful to you until a year and a day passes, should you keep your oath.”

The glow reaches out and dances in long, lazy spirals around Greengrass’s hands and wand. She holds her breath for a second, as though she thinks it’s going to bite her. But then it settles so that it just surrounds her arms, and she lets her breath go with a whoosh.

“The oath is sealed,” she says, and shudders a little as she stands up. “I haven’t felt one that powerful in—many years.”

Harry glances at Nott and Selwyn. They don’t seem interested in swearing the same oath, though. Harry nods and turns to Sirius. “Is that all? I know I promised I’d come to your house right off the train, but Severus wants me at our house. And my friends are there, too.” Theo and Blaise and Astoria and Daphne agreed to Floo to the house Harry and Severus share with Severus, but none of them were happy about it.

“Yes, Harry,” Sirius says, and his face is soft and happy. Harry relaxes a little. What he did must not be perfect, but it must be good enough.

He nods to the pure-bloods and then goes to the fireplace. As he reaches for the Floo powder, the sensation of eyes on him seems to sear his skin, and he glances a little to the side.

Draco is standing in the doorway that leads into the entrance hall by the stairs.

Harry holds his eyes and doesn’t look away until he has to step into the fire. He doesn’t know what’s in Draco’s eyes and mind. Come to that, he’s not sure Draco knows himself.

*

The room has always been dark and warm and welcoming for Dolores since she was a young child. Sometimes it was the only place where she could go to think, be by herself, and wrestle with the shame of being a half-blood.

But now, when she goes in and turns to face the far wall, she knows there will be something waiting for her. And there is.

A spark of light from her wand illuminates the far wall, and the huge shape looms up. Dolores bows her head and closes his eyes, but even so, she can see the haunches, the long neck, the head of a great cat in silhouette.

_You promised me a powerful gift._

“You will have it,” Dolores says promptly, and knows that the confident tone of her voice makes the creature pay more attention. When she cringes, it knows that she’s afraid she can’t provide for it. “I’ve managed to get myself appointed Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts. There’s powerful children attending that school, including the one I told you about.”

_Harry Potter._

“Yes. He’ll be in my classes, because he hasn’t taken his OWLS yet and has no choice about taking it.”

 _I care not for the reason why._ The cat’s tail twitches, and Dolores looks down again. _What matters is that he will be within my reach._

“Yes.”

_You must lure him within my reach. I could not venture too far in the corridors of Hogwarts from whatever corner you make your own._

“That will be easy enough. He’s spreading lies about the return of the so-called Dark Lord. I’ll give him detention. And I’ll have him use the Black Quill, so that he can—be more entertaining to you.”

The cat stalks slowly back and forth on the wall. Dolores keeps her gaze lowered. When it’s in this mood, it would eat anything, anyone, and not pay much attention to the reasons until later. It wouldn’t mourn her if it devoured her corpse.

_You must stretch it out. A meal seasoned by torment over weeks will make me stronger._

“You have my word,” Dolores whispers, and keeps her head bowed until the cat leaps into the darkness beyond the light of her wand and is gone. Then she backs slowly from the room and locks the door behind her. She will need to recreate it at Hogwarts.

But she can do that, now. She has never been so confident in her ability to provide appropriate prey to the great cat, or in her ability to keep doing so over a long period of time rather than needing to make it quick.

And then she will have the power that the creature has promised her. _All_ the power.


	2. Unwanted Sacrifices

“ _Harry Potter._ ”

Harry has become used to hearing his name in Parseltongue, but it still makes him flinch, a little. That’s the language Voldemort speaks in his nightmares—the ordinary ones, not the visions. “ _Lyassa_ ,” he says, nodding as he watches the Speaker slither towards him. She’s a snake from the waist down only, but her eyes shine in a way he’s not used to. “ _You said that you had good news._ ”

“ _I do_.” Lyassa pauses in front of him, in the middle of Severus’s drawing room, and bows her head a little to him. “ _But I wanted to offer you condolences, first, on the passing of your brave companion._ ”

Harry swallows. One thing Parseltongue is really good for is demonstrating sincerity, whether that’s about grief or the desire to kill and eat something. He knows Lyassa really does mourn with him. “ _Thank you_.”

Lyassa keeps her head bowed for a second, then tosses her scaled ribbons of hair behind her shoulders as she smiles at him. “ _I wanted to tell you that I know that Theodore Nott does not have to fear his father._ ”

Harry blinks. “ _I didn’t know his stepmother was a Parselmouth._ ”

“ _His stepmother is me._ ”

Harry knows he’s staring like an idiot, something the Speakers have tried to train him out of, but from the way Lyassa is smiling, she enjoys it, for once. Then Harry shakes his head. “ _But his stepmother is a human woman. That’s what Theo said._ ” He emphasizes the name a little, and Lyassa notices, from the way she nods. Then again, Theo isn’t likely to be bothered when she’ll probably never say the name in English around him.

“ _Did you forget that we can shift our forms? I married him in my human form, which he had never seen. But he owed you a debt for trying to betray you, and I wanted to make sure that he paid the debt and would not hurt your friend._ ”

Harry swallows back his astonishment and manages to ask, “ _And you thought this would help me_?”

“ _I have neutralized Tarquinius. He planned to murder your friend because he believed he would be able to replace them with the children he thought his wife was carrying. And I made him send the results of your test with the Silver Hourglass to your guardians._ ”

Harry pauses. It’s true that he’s been curious about the results of that strange test Tarquinius conducted to measure his magical skills for a while now, but he saw no way of making Tarquinius talk about them to him when he was on the verge of being a danger even to Theo. “ _It was still something you didn’t need to do_.”

“ _I doubt your friend will see it that way. Particularly when it means that he can still take his revenge._ ”

“ _You don’t feel at all for the man you married_?”

“ _He regularly did to me what would have been abuse to a human woman._ ” Lyassa’s voice turns a shade cooler. “ _No, I do not._ ”

In the end, Harry just nods. He doesn’t think that scolding Lyassa will give the impression he wants to give. Better to tell Theo and let him deal with the consequences in the way he wants. Maybe he’ll even be happy for it, the way Lyassa seems to think.

“ _You said in your letter that you were going to teach me how to use the firestone Chaos left me._ ” Harry takes it out of his pocket. For a moment, it sparks in his hand, and Lion, the winged snake on his shoulder, stretches his neck down and looks at it intently.

“ _Yes. The gift you have been given is highly unusual, but not unprecedented. And we know how to handle dragon gifts._ ”

“ _Oh._ ” Harry spends a moment fiddling with the stone. He isn’t sure that he likes the idea of the Speakers having access to it, although honestly, he doesn’t think they’d steal it. But it still feels like an intrusion on his grief for Chaos.

He sighs and holds out the firestone to Lyassa. She actually pulls back, her tail coiling as if she’s going to launch herself at him.

“ _You will retain possession of the gift, of course. There is no doubt that she meant you to have it, and if we took it, it would—it would be wrong._ ”

Harry blinks. “ _All right._ ” He’s a little startled to find something that _is_ wrong in the Speakers’ flexible code of ethics, but not upset. “ _Then what are you going to teach me to do with it? Summon fire_?”

“ _In a sense._ ” Lyassa smiles. “ _Why don’t you get close to the hearth and comfortable there? This will make things easier._ ”

*

“So my stepmother has been…you, all along.”

“Yes,” the massive Speaker in front of Theo says. She has the tail of a shining green snake, and she’s a woman from the waist up. Her face is narrow, and Theo can see fangs when she smiles. She has green hair that looks almost normal when the light isn’t catching it, either black or brown, and then she stirs and the scales it’s obviously made of flicker to life. Theo watches her and wonders why she chose to do this.

On the other hand, that’s the kind of question that he has the right to ask as an ally, doesn’t he? And someone who the Speakers apparently wanted to avenge. He leans forwards from the low chair in the middle of Harry’s drawing room where Lyassa chose to confront him. “Why did you choose to target my father?”

“He was too dangerous to leave alone.” Lyassa folds her hands and regards him. “Especially since Harry owed him a favor, and he had the Dark Mark, and he had the results of Harry’s tests before the Silver Hourglass.”

Theo blinks at that. “Are they so remarkable?” He was tested himself when he was young, as most children raised in the magical world are, so parents will know what kind of schooling they’d benefit from, but he can’t remember it being a huge source of excitement.

“I think his guardians will need to know how to properly interpret them.”

Theo frowns. “Fine.” He studies Lyassa. “And you want to reassure me that it’s perfectly safe for me to go home if I need to.”

“Yes.” Lyassa smiles in a way that makes her fangs appear less prominent, but Theo doesn’t assume she’s doing it to comfort him. The Speakers seem to care very little for the comfort of humans whose names aren’t Harry Potter. “I have your father under a form of mind control that does not allow him to defy me, and I have ordered him to leave you strictly alone.”

“I worry that he might find a way around it.”

“That is an irrational fear.”

“Then I am prey to irrational fears.” Theo relaxes back against the cushions on the couch and watches as Lyassa’s tail stops twitching. If she attacks suddenly, he’s in a good position to at least fire off one curse, and he’s in the house with a Potions expert who should be able to get him some antivenin. “But I appreciate what you did for me.”

Lyassa continues to study him as if he’s prey, which makes Theo clench his hand tighter around his wand. But at last she nods and sweeps from the room with her tail the last part of her to disappear.

Theo sighs. He has no doubt that his father is under a form of mind control, and _is_ safer to approach than he’s probably been in years.

But…

Theo’s mother thought she was safe at one time. Theo believed his father would never harm him, at one time. He studied the potions that he used on his father for so long because he wanted to make sure that there was no way his father could combat them, and because he had to hide his research, to make absolutely sure there was no way his father could anticipate what he was doing and kill him for it.

For right now, Theo will stay where he is, although he will make requests of his father with more confidence in them being answered than normal.

And he’ll also keep his eye on Harry, the way he prefers to. Why should he sleep in another house halfway across the country when he’s linked to Harry in his dreams?

*

Draco flings the book across the room in disgust. Honestly, why _can’t_ he find some way to countermand his father’s final order to the Malfoy house-elves with less effort than this? It can’t be the first time that someone was deprived of their inheritance by an ill-worded demand to elves. And elves can be got around. They’re far more literal than wizards, after all.

Unfortunately, that’s part of the problem, from what Draco’s been finding. It’s actually easier to get around a complicated, in-depth order to elves that leaves a lot of loopholes and things that they weren’t explicitly told not to do. From what he knows, his father told the Malfoy elves not to listen to anyone but him, and so they won’t.

_There’s not much arguing you can do with that._

A slight shadow stirs in the doorway, and Draco looks up to see Hecuba Selwyn standing there. His stomach clenches uncomfortably as he stands up and nods to her. There aren’t that many pure-bloods who make him feel this way, and the rest of the Selwyn family doesn’t, but even his father would have been wary about crossing Hecuba.

“Young Mr. Malfoy,” Selwyn says. “My condolences on the death of your father.”

Draco stares at her, unable not to. She has to know that Lucius Malfoy died trying to kill Harry Potter, and didn’t she swear loyalty to Harry for a month?

Selwyn seems to know what he’s thinking, which Draco sincerely hopes is just because she’s so intelligent and not because she used Legilimency. He didn’t feel the fluttering probe in his mind, though. She comes into the library with a smile and shuts the door behind her. Draco keeps himself from reaching for his wand, but it’s difficult.

“Be at ease,” Selwyn says. “I only want some information. We can trade.”

“If I betray something about my cousin, then both my cousin _and_ my mother are going to be after me,” Draco says flatly. “And I’m sorry, but they scare me more than you do.”

“Is that true?” Selwyn wonders, and holds out a hand palm up in front of her. Draco stares at it, unsure what he’s supposed to be seeing, but noticing that the air over it wavers as if she has an illusion there.

Then the illusion breaks, or maybe the magic comes fully into being. There’s a small black rat crouched there. It looks as if it’s made of glassy obsidian rather than a true animal, but it has small, bright teeth, and wicked, sharp claws, and it edges forwards to the edge of Selwyn’s hand and makes a growling sound.

Draco feels himself sweating under his robes. He’s seen Harry conjure fire in the same way, and Disarm people with his hand, and conjure a shield, but he’s never created an animal. Selwyn is more powerful than Harry is.

“Be at ease,” Selwyn repeats, and there’s an odd note in her voice that takes Draco’s attention away from the rat for a second. He sees that her arm is shaking where she holds it out, and there’s also sweat on her forehead.

All right. So conjuring the rat wasn’t easy for her. Draco is still afraid, but less so than he would have been if she’d managed to hide the effort it took her.

Selwyn closes her eyes and bows her head for a second. Then she nods and looks up. Her face is clear enough that Draco feels terror skitter lightly across his mind.

“What kind of information do you want?” he whispers. “And isn’t your promise of loyalty to Harry keeping you from doing this?”

“Ah, but you had a falling-out, and are not exactly a friend under his protection.” Selwyn smiles and pulls her hand back towards her. The rat leaps from it before it falls entirely down to her side and scuttles up to her shoulder, to sit with its nose wrinkling. Its beady little eyes are still fixed fiercely on Draco. “And I told you, I don’t _intend_ to hurt you. I want some information on Harry Potter’s personality.”

Draco swallows, his eyes on the rat. Harry’s personality can’t be that much of a secret, really. And it’s not like he’s going to give Selwyn information on the defensive magic Harry can do. Not even the wandless magic.

“I mean, he’s impulsive,” Draco says, trying to imagine how his mother would approach a request like this, what she would say. It doesn’t help much to realize that she would never be caught in this situation in the first place. “He was a Gryffindor before he was Sorted into Slytherin, and that’s still there. He doesn’t delegate enough.”

“What does that mean?”

“There are things other people could easily do. His followers. I mean, his friends. And he doesn’t let them do them. He just tries to do everything himself.”

“ _Ah_ ,” Selwyn sighs, like Draco has told her something she dearly wants to know. She props her chin up for a second on the rat’s back, then touches it with a finger in the middle of its spine. It dissolves into black flecks that disappear into the carpet like soot. “Would you say that he tends to take responsibility for anything that happens around him? Whether it was his fault or not?”

Draco frowns. “No.”

“Why not?”

“He didn’t take responsibility for my father’s death,” Draco snaps. His chest aches, and even though he knows that Lucius was taking his chances being a Death Eater, well, he didn’t die at Voldemort’s hands, did he? He burned to death in dragonfire. Draco can’t imagine what an infinity of pain that must have been. “He didn’t put enough spells on his bloody dragon to protect people from her.”

Selwyn frowns at him as if he isn’t telling her what she wants to know. But Draco is a little braver now that the rat is gone, and his mind is working. He folds his arms and looks away from her.

_Show her what she expects. Your sulkiness, your weakness._

Draco can do that. Even if he thinks that he shouldn’t _need_ to protect Harry and someone who didn’t restrain a dragon from burning someone to death should be able to take his chances, the plain fact is that other people don’t agree. And Draco is already in a fragile enough place when it comes to his cousin and Harry.

“You imagine that he could have controlled the dragon?”

“Sure. There were times that she wanted to burn other people and didn’t.” This is the truth, and Draco turns back to Selwyn. “Students in school, things like that. The only person she actually _killed_ before Father was Fenrir Greyback, and it sounds like Harry was taken by surprise when she killed _him_. I don’t think anyone knew Greyback could sneak through the wards at Hogwarts.”

“Hmmm.” Selwyn is tapping her fingers together in slow motions that make it look like she might snap them any second. Draco keeps a wary eye on them and tries to convince himself that no other threats will appear there, but it’s sort of a useless reassurance. “What about the werewolf scars the boy bears?”

Draco shrugs. “Honestly, I don’t think much about them. They’re not as noticeable as they were. I don’t know anyone who thinks much about them.”

“A source of weakness?”

“You mean, because people might ignore them until they don’t?” Draco doesn’t have to feign the uncertainty in his voice. “I don’t know. I know a lot of people were upset when it first happened, but not even the paper has mentioned Harry being attacked by Greyback in a while.”

“That should change.”

Draco keeps quiet. That isn’t something he has the power to change, but he does have the ability to go to his mother right after this and warn her about the incoming threat.

As if she hears his thoughts—which _can_ happen—Selwyn looks at him and smiles. “I don’t think I need to tell you to keep this between ourselves, do I, young Malfoy?”

“What are you doing with my son, Madam Selwyn?”

Draco wants to collapse with relief as he sees his mother come to a stop in the library door, which she’s opened. Selwyn doesn’t spin around, but Draco couldn’t have expected that. She turns slowly instead, shaking her head a little as if in amusement.

“Why, teaching him politics, Madam Malfoy.”

“I have reserved that charge for myself. Not that you could have known, of course.” Mother is smiling as she glides towards Selwyn, but her eyes are bright in a way that Draco thinks the other woman is bright enough to take as a warning. “I do hope that you wouldn’t begin with a lesson in keeping secrets, of course. My son is still young enough to need guidance on this.”

“Well, of course. He is your son. You should train him better.”

That’s probably meant as a parting shot, but Draco doesn’t care. He’s shaking a little as he watches Selwyn depart. His mother gently lays her hands on his shoulders and gazes into his eyes, asking for permission to read his thoughts.

Draco grants it, and watches her mouth tighten.

“Well. I have little faith in that oath Harry made her swear, if it results in this.” Mother shakes her head and steps back. “Thank you, Draco. I understand your complicated feelings towards Harry perfectly—” and Draco thinks she actually might, since she was just inside them “—but I am glad that you played a good political part in this.”

“Despite telling her so much?”

“Most of it she could have learned elsewhere. And she wanted to manipulate you with grief for your father, and you realized what she was doing and didn’t let her do it.”

Mother gives him a bright, soft smile, the kind that makes Draco’s heart feel like it could probably float out of his chest. He nods.

Mother nods back and glides out of the room.

Draco watches her go, then begins to look for other books. This time, researching house-elves doesn’t hold as much appeal. He wants to know more about political games that people have played in the past, and the Black library is good about holding books that discuss such machinations in obsessive detail.

And wandless magic. He wants to know more about it. If Selwyn could impress him so much with it, even though he knew what she was doing with it, how much more could Draco use it to impress someone who isn’t expecting it?


	3. Creatures in the Night

Harry twists, deep in the middle of an uneasy dream. This doesn’t feel like an ordinary nightmare, and it doesn’t feel like one of the visions that Voldemort sends him, either. This is somewhere in between, real enough to give him the grainy texture of a floor under his feet, dream-like enough to make him unaware of what’s watching him.

And something _is_ watching him. He’s absolutely certain of it.

Harry looks around. He’s in the middle of a corridor that looks like a mishmash of one at Grimmauld Place and one at Hogwarts, and he clenches his hands over that, even though he’s trying to keep his face calm. He wouldn’t dream like this most of the time.

This is someone else’s dream, he thinks, the way he has about the visions of Voldemort, and then he sees a drifting shadow out of the corner of his eye and changes his mind.

This is some _thing_ else’s dream.

A low sound comes to him. Harry thinks of it as thunder or a drum played far away, and then recategorizes it. No, it’s the growl of a large, hidden predator.

Imagining what Chaos would have done, Harry turns to face the sound. It seems to be coming from a wall that’s an amalgamation of stone, wood, paper, plaster, and fronds, like something in an old jungle.

The fronds attempt to twist and warp and become tall trees. Harry doesn’t let them. He stares steadily, and says, “Come out, if you aren’t afraid.”

The growl doesn’t repeat, but Harry is absolutely sure there are ferocious eyes watching him. It feels like an animal, not a human being. It feels like—and Harry grimaces as he thinks of it—the difference between a werewolf in beast form and human form.

He’s growing more familiar with that than he’d like, thanks to Voldemort’s latest nightmares about recruitment.

He feels something sailing towards his back, and he ducks down to the odd floor, which is carpet and stone and grass, and slams his arm down sharply, hissing, “ _Come to me!_ ” The floor writhes and turns into a group of grass-green snakes.

Granted, it’s likely that the Speakers never thought of him using this trick in dreams when they taught it to him, but that doesn’t mean Harry can’t use it that way. He stands up with snakes curling around his feet and says, “ _Seek out my enemy._ ”

The serpents surge away from him towards the walls. The fronds fade as Harry watches, and so does the sensation of watching eyes.

And there’s no trace whatsoever of the thing that leaped at him.

Harry takes a slow step away, and the dream slips and surges. He wakes up in his bed, and blinks for a moment at the canopy above him before turning towards the door. Lion is awake and hissing excitedly on Harry’s pillow, nonsense about “ _the great enemy_ ” and “ _we drove him away._ ”

“Yes, yes, we did,” Harry says wearily, stroking down Lion’s neck and only raising his eyebrows a little as the door bursts open with Theo right behind it.

“What dream was that?’ Theo demands, striding towards him. He plops down on the end of Harry’s bed and stares at him as if he thinks it’s likely Harry goes around classifying his dreams by how weird they are or something.

“I don’t know,” Harry says, and touches Lion to calm him down. “Lion is saying something about ‘the great enemy.’ I don’t think it was Voldemort, but something else that intruded into my head.”

Theo shakes his head. “Only you would have two people who can do that. Wait, you said, some _thing._ Why?”

Harry describes the jungle fronds, and the growl, and the sensation that something was leaping at his back. “It was like being stalked by a predator,” he finishes. “A cat, maybe. I doubt it was human.”

“Maybe not, but I don’t know any creature who could do what that one did, if it really is an animal.” Theo sounds almost offended.

Harry starts to say something else, but ends up yawning instead. He shifts back into the bed, and Lion curls around his wrist and hisses, “ _Sleep_.” “I really am tired,” Harry says. “Can I wait until the morning to tell—Severus?” Sometimes he’s still shy about calling the man by his first name, even though Theo’s heard him do it before.

Theo looks at him and then nods. “As long as you’re aware that if you don’t tell him right away, then I will.”

Harry nods back. “I promise, I’ll tell him first thing at breakfast next morning.”

*

Severus listens to Harry’s account of the dream, aware even as he does so of the four other pairs of listening ears at the table: Mr. Nott, Mr. Zabini, and the two Misses Greengrass. Little Astoria is so wide-eyed that Severus fully expects to deal with nightmares from her tonight. But Daphne, at least, is stroking her sister’s hair and whispering reassurances about how it couldn’t have been bad because Harry is sitting here, and that means that he must have beaten the thing.

“Have you ever heard of anything like that?” Harry finishes with. He tries to sneak a piece of the spinach from his omelet to Lion. Severus watches him, and Harry sighs and puts it back on the plate and finishes it—not that his snake was showing a sign of taking it anyway.

“No,” Severus says slowly.

Harry looks startled, and worried in a way that makes Severus wish he could have lied. “I thought—you have so much knowledge about Occlumency and the mind.”

“Thank you.” Severus clasps his hands on either side of the mug of tea and watches Mr. Nott for a second. Mr. Nott gives his head a slight shake, and Severus’s last hope that _someone_ might know what this is dies. He sighs and faces Harry again. “Dream magic, however, is something else, and beyond my experience. I was approaching the limits of my expertise in tying your mind together with Mr. Nott’s so that he could defend you in your nightmares.”

“All right,” Harry says, with an easy acceptance that Severus wishes he hadn’t had to learn. “But we’ll do research and find the answer eventually. I know that.” He flashes Severus a smile and then turns to listen to something Daphne Greengrass is saying to him.

The faith in him settles something in Severus’s stomach. He doesn’t like that Harry is having these dreams at all, but yes, they _will_ learn what the creature in them is sooner or later.

He isn’t entirely surprised when Nott follows him into his lab after breakfast, but to his utter surprise, the boy doesn’t want to talk about the dream he saw, or sensed. “I think I should speed up my training,” Nott says, standing with his hands clasped behind his back like a soldier, or a professor. “I want to become an Animagus.”

Severus stares at him for a long second. “Why?”

“I cast the spell on a mirror that allows you to catch a glimpse of what kind of Animagus you’re going to be,” Nott says coolly. “I know the clues are hard to interpret, usually, but I saw a spotted tail. I’m going to be a great cat—a jaguar or a leopard, probably. I could protect Harry that way, and I could probably combat the creature in his dreams if it turns out to be a predator of some kind.”

“We do not even know for sure that some kind of beast is invading his sleeping mind.”

Nott raises his eyebrows in the kind of sharp look that Severus thinks the Slytherins probably learned from him. Then again, he does prefer it to several of Nott’s other possible expressions. “I wouldn’t count on that, sir, or trust that supposition to protect Harry.”

After a moment, Severus nods. “Very well. But you must understand that I am not an expert in Transfiguration.”

“I know. But Sirius Black is. Could you recommend that he take over my training?”

Severus stares in silence. Nott looks back at him, with no sign that this is a joke. And Severus has to admit that of all Harry’s friends staying here this summer, Nott is the last person who would play one.

“He may not take a recommendation from me in the way you would hope,” Severus finally says, the only thing he can think of to say. “And he may not want to train a Slytherin.”

“He puts up with Harry well enough.”

“I believe that he thinks of Harry as a Gryffindor who unfortunately has to spend a lot of time in Slytherin House.”

Nott considers that for a long moment, then nods. “All right. Well, I’d prefer that you ask him, sir, and then I’ll see if he’d be agreeable to training me at all.”

“Are you going to tell Harry about this?”

Nott’s face makes a funny expression that Severus finds hard to read, despite all his expertise in Occlumency. “Of course, sir. It’s the kind of thing that he’d expect me to tell him, and I wouldn’t want him to know only when I show up in his head as a leopard or jaguar for the first time.”

Severus frowns harder, but nods his dismissal, and Nott leaves. Severus narrows hie eyes after him, but Harry slips into the lab before Severus can make a plan to go in search of him, or anyone else.

Severus lifts his eyebrows a little higher. “Are you all right?”

Harry pauses and stares at him warily. “I told you what happened, right?” When Severus nods, Harry forges ahead. “And you’re not going to get angry at me for not coming to tell you right away?”

“You needed your sleep. And you did tell me very soon. I don’t blame you for not wanting to express all the emotions you might have expressed at breakfast.”

Harry swallows and nods. “Good.” He hesitates, and Lion twines out of his robes and up to his shoulder, fluttering his wings a little. “Did I—well, no, Theo couldn’t tell you, because he doesn’t speak Parseltongue. And I didn’t know if I should mention it before the others?”

“It’s all right,” Severus says as gently as he can. He sits down in the chair nearest the table with the largest cauldron and focuses all his attention on his ward. “You can tell me anything that happened. Any details that Mr. Nott didn’t know about are not your fault.”

Harry slowly nods. “Lion told me that we defeated the great enemy.” He nudges his snake and hisses to him in Parseltongue. Lion replies with a twist of his neck and goes back to peering around as if he’s sure that the shadows hold more great beasts. Harry sighs and turns back to Severus. “He says that he can’t tell me what that means. I’m sorry.”

“Please do not be.” Severus hears the desperate note in his own voice, and Harry blinks at him a little. Severus hesitates, glances over to make sure the door of the lab is shut, and then gets up and crosses the distance between him and Harry. “You underwent something horrible in the forest.”

Harry nods. His hand wobbles to the side for a second, then folds in towards his ribs. Severus is sure that he’s touching the firestone that Chaos left him, and which the Speakers are now teaching him how to use.

_Good. Teach him how to use everything and anything that you can, to keep him safe._

“But I want to make sure that you know you can always lean on me for—safety. Solace.” The words are so hard to speak that Severus feels as if his lips have turned to wood. He sighs out. “Do you feel that way, Harry?”

“I feel that way,” Harry says. “I just—don’t want to distress you, and I think I might if it’s something that you can’t help with. Like these nightmares I can’t learn Occlumency to defeat no matter how hard I try.”

“Any amount of distress would be worth it to me if I could keep you safe.” Severus licks his lips and then ends up pressing down with his hand on Harry’s shoulder. He doesn’t know what to say. He wishes he was better at this. He’s been, so far, the guardian who takes ruthless action in defense of Harry. That’s different from being a healer. “Please come to me if you need anything at all.”

Harry nods. “All right.” Then he pauses. “Did you want to see one of the ways that the Speakers have taught me to use the firestone?”

“I would much like to see it.”

Again Severus feels like he’s speaking through wooden lips, mostly because he’s concerned about frightening Harry off, but Harry must not see anything wrong with it, because he nods and takes the firestone from his pocket. It sparks softly, and flame courses up his arm.

Severus draws his wand before he can think, but Harry only shakes his head at him. “I can control it. See? Lion isn’t afraid.”

A winged snake being fearless is not reassurance for Severus, but he puts his wand away as he watches the way Harry touches the fire, a wistful look in his eyes, before he lowers his hand and clenches it into a fist. The flames waft back and forth, then create a snake that coils around Harry’s arm and stares at Severus with intelligent holes that could pass as eyes.

“Can you form it into a dragon?” he finds himself asking.

“Not yet.” Harry touches the snake’s head, and it turns and flicks out a tongue shaped like a lightning bolt before it dissolves back into the general fire. “That’s a more advanced sort of thing. A snake I already know how to control. But a dragon will have to fly, and actually breathe out the fire, and—if I want it to look like Chaos, I need a lot more work.”

“How strange,” Severus says before he thinks better of it. “I would think that you could form whatever pictures you wanted once you knew how to control the fire.”

Harry blinks, then smiles a little. “It’s not pictures, sir. The snake _existed,_ and the dragon will exist, too, once I know how to form her.”

“Of course, I can see that,” Severus says, a little puzzled. “The snake certainly looked as if it was really coiled around your arm, and as if it could burn someone to protect you.”

Harry hisses something, pauses, and then turns and hisses at Lion. Lion just turns his head back and forth, obviously not concerned with helping Harry explain. Harry sighs. “It’s more than that, sir. More than images, or even creating an animal of fire that could defend me by burning someone. It’s about—being able to call a protector forwards at _any_ time. A living creature, a spirit embodied in the fire.”

Severus blinks. “So closer to using a ritual circle to summon help.”

Harry nods enthusiastically, his eyes shining for a second in a way that Severus once thought he would never see again. “Exactly, sir. I should have known that you would find the right words for it.”

“Severus,” Severus says, before he can think better, but Harry doesn’t flinch at the correction. He just grins and nods again. “But you won’t need to build a ritual circle, and you won’t need to worry that whatever you summon isn’t under your control.”

Oddly enough, that makes Harry grow silent and thoughtful again. He shakes his head and says, “Do you know, I don’t think that I have them under control? I’ll work with them as partners, the way I work with Lion.” He thinks about it some more, then adds, “The way I worked with Chaos.”

“Appropriate, then.” Severus watches him for a second, then sighs. “Do you think you could ask the Speakers about ways to defend your mind? From the nightmares, the visions, and whatever this creature is that hunts you now?”

“I’ll try.” Harry looks earnest and sad. “But sometimes they’re more interested in teaching me whatever they _want_ to teach me instead of what I want to learn. Because they say that I’m going to need it.”

Severus has to agree that the priorities of a group of possibly immortal snake shapeshifters are probably beyond him, as well. “If they concentrate on what you’re going to need, then I cannot fault them.”

Abruptly, Harry leans sideways and hugs him. Severus freezes, but does manage to shake that off and put his hands on Harry’s shoulders before he can withdraw.

“I’m sorry,” Harry whispers. “I know that this frightens you. I would master Occlumency tonight if I could, and I wouldn’t care if I never saw anything from Voldemort again. I promise that I’m not keeping the connection open as—as some kind of attempt to spy on him or something.”

“I never thought that,” Severus whispers, and lets himself hold the boy that he thinks of as a son.

He can say that, in the privacy of his own head, if nothing else. It’s something he can say. Protecting Harry is something he can do.

And if he must do more than that, he is sure that he can, as well. He would do anything.


	4. Dread in the Day

“ _It concerns me that this enemy has appeared in your dreams._ ”

Harry sighs as he gets up from the cramped position on the floor Lyassa has been having him sit in to practice with Chaos’s firestone. She insists that he needs to be able to concentrate on such important magic through any manner of pain. Harry sort of appreciates that, but he doesn’t know if the pain of not moving for thirty minutes really counts. “I don’t suppose you could tell me more about it?”

Lyassa doesn’t respond immediately. Harry looks at her and sees her flicking her tail, a sign of uncertainty. “Are you all right?”

“ _To speak the name is to summon the being._ ”

Harry swallows. “So you think it would come to more of my dreams and stalk me through them if someone talked about it in detail?”

“ _Yes. Let us say that it is a creature who fought us for supremacy once, when we still lived more prominently in this world, and lost. It hates us. It hates Parselmouths. We will work on dream magic, however._ ”

Harry nods. “Thanks. That’s the kind of thing I wanted to hear. I’m still pants at protecting my mind from Occlumency.”

“ _Is pants like being shirty_?”

Harry has to laugh. Of course, the Speakers barely wear clothing except when they’re in their two-legged forms and interacting with humans, and those are rare occasions. “No, sorry. I just mean I’m not very good at it.”

Lyassa shrugs with a roll of her shoulders and a clack of the scales that make up her “hair.” “ _Humans have their analogies, and we have ours. We will work on dream magic the next time I come. But I think it is time for you to leave now so that you will not be late to your meeting with the dog-smelling man._ ”

Harry rolls his eyes. The Speakers know Sirius’s name well enough, but they refuse to use it since Sirius refuses to have them in his house. “ _You know that it’s for a practical reason now. He can’t have my lessons there with all the Dark wizards that he has coming and going—not if we’re going to keep it a secret._ ”

“ _And was it for a practical reason last summer_?”

Harry hesitates, and Lyassa nods. “ _You know that, sooner or later, you will have to show off your Parseltongue in front of them. Your dog will have to become accustomed to it, and so will your wolf._ ”

Harry switches back to English. “I know. But I’m not going to make them do it now.”

“ _Their loss,_ ” Lyassa says, before she turns around and glides back towards the corner by the fireplace that the Speakers usually enter by. “ _Now, I must return to my loving husband._ ”

She chuckles before she thins to a point of light and vanishes. Harry sighs, and harder when he glances over to the door of the library and realizes that Theo’s standing there. A conversation shouldn’t blunt his awareness so much that he doesn’t even notice someone come in, not when it could cost him his awareness someday.

“Don’t worry,” Theo says, probably just guessing his thoughts instead of skimming them with Legilimency. “I’ve reconciled myself to her presence as my stepmother. And my father has been doing everything I ask of him by letter.”

“But?” Harry falls into step beside Theo as they head for the fireplace, absently balancing Lion on his shoulder. Severus comes out of his lab to watch them. Harry waves at him and says, “I’m going over to Grimmauld Place.”

“Be careful,” Severus says, as he always says since the day that Greyback attacked Harry at Grimmauld Place, and goes back into the lab and shuts the door behind him.

“We will be,” Theo tells the lab door.

Harry eyes him as he picks up the Floo powder. “Are you sure that you want to come with me?”

“Are you sure that you want to try and go without me?”

Harry scowls, but doesn’t try to prevent Theo from following him as they go through the flames. He just hopes that Theo remembers the discussion they had about Draco—that is, that he is utterly off-limits from being harmed. Harry appreciates Theo’s protectiveness, but sometimes he gets sick of it.

*

“Harry.” Sirius hugs his godson hard, and then pulls back and surveys him. The jangling nervousness that has been plaguing him all day recedes a little as he meets Harry’s eyes. Harry still hasn’t fully recovered from what happened at the end of his fourth year—that’s obvious—but he’s so much better.

Once, Sirius thought he might not wake up sane from his bed in the hospital wing. This is a wonderful gift.

“Are you all right, Sirius?”

Sirius smiles and ruffles Harry’s hair, then nods at the Nott boy standing behind him. Merlin knows he’d never try to ruffle _that_ one’s hair, even in jest. “Yeah, the guests you met before for the alliance are coming over, and they’re bringing some new people with them. I _hate_ entertaining.”

“Even though he’s so good at presenting himself as the leader of the alliance,” Cissy says, sailing through the door of the sitting room where the Floo entrance lets out. “Hello, Harry, Mr. Nott.”

“Mrs. Malfoy.” Nott bows from the waist, correct and perfect. He’s a quiet kid, even quieter than Harry’s Zabini friend, with calm dark eyes and an intense interest in books. There’s no reason for Sirius to feel more nervous at the sight of him, but he does.

Well, at least he’s sure all that ferocious intensity will be channeled into protecting Harry, so that’s something.

“Hi, Mrs. Malfoy,” Harry says, and he’s shifting around a little as if he wants to ask a question by telepathy instead of words.

“Draco is in the library and won’t be participating in this meeting,” Cissy says. For a moment, her gaze crosses Sirius’s, and she frowns at him. “But we have perhaps ten minutes before it begins. Will you excuse me, dear?”

“Of course.” Harry looks relieved and confused. For that matter, Sirius shares the last emotion. He doesn’t resist as Cissy grabs his arm and steers him towards a little room off to the side that Sirius’s father used as a study, but he doesn’t know what she could want. They’ve practically rehearsed every step of the meeting, every word. Does she think he’s forgotten it all?

But when Cissy shuts the door behind her, it’s to scan him closely and say, “What’s wrong, cousin?”

“I’m nervous about being in front of these wankers. I’m sure you heard me tell Harry that.”

“I didn’t mean that. You’re—you look as if you’re about to claw your own skin off. This isn’t nervousness.”

“How would you know when you never feel nervous yourself?” Sirius snaps back, and then limits himself to a deep breath when Cissy just stares at him. “Right, that wasn’t fair.”

“Or true. Of course I’m nervous. I’m nervous about my son’s future. I’m nervous about what you’re concealing from me.” Cissy folds her arms when Sirius starts to say he’s not hiding anything. “ _Listen_ to your feelings, Sirius. I think that you’re vibrating like this because your instincts know something your rational brain doesn’t right now.”

She doesn’t say _what little rational brain you have,_ but Sirius knows she’s thinking it. He closes his eyes and concentrates on his magic and instincts instead of snapping back at her. He frowns as his brain rushes and dances through odd corridors and doesn’t calm down. There’s—

“There’s magic out there that’s familiar, but unpleasant,” he says, opening his eyes. “Coming closer.”

Cissy stiffens, her head tilting up a little. “Here yet?”

Sirius shakes his head. “But approaching.”

“Then we must guard the house,” Cissy says, and steps away from him, her hands down at her sides with the palms displayed. Sirius wonders what the hell she’s doing until she adds, “Engage the wards, Sirius.”

Sirius understands then. The Black wards are extremely unamused about someone, even if they’re of the family, appearing like a threat when they’re engaged. Sirius closes his eyes and reaches out, twining his magic with the active wards of the house. Most of the time, they sleep. Sirius has passive defenses up against the obvious threats—werewolves, after last summer, are included, and Dumbledore’s magical signature—and they jangle and scream and bounce someone off if they try to enter.

Active wards are…different.

“There,” Cissy says, sounding a little breathless. Sirius opens his eyes and sees her looking at the far wall. There must have been a crackle of light or movement as the wards engaged. “That should keep us safe.”

Sirius nods, but then he hears the whoosh of the Floo, which means his “guests” are arriving for the “alliance meeting.” He grimaces and pats down his robes one more time, then opens the door of the study.

“It’s going to be all right, Sirius.”

Sirius starts to answer, but that’s when they hear the screaming start down the corridor.

As he starts to run, Sirius thinks grimly, _Trust Cissy to jinx things._

*

Theo is standing next to Harry at the edge of the large sitting room that they came into, the one that has the only active fireplace as far as he knows. He watches as the guests come through the flames, mentally ticking them off. There’s his own cousin, Milton Nott, a weedy bastard who was always angry that Tarquinius had a son, helping a woman with the look of the Shafiqs through the fire. There’s Astoria and Daphne’s aunt with another Greengrass relative. And there’s Hecuba Selwyn with—

The tall woman with the curly blonde hair comes through the fire and tries to draw her wand, only to begin to scream and clutch at her arm.

It doesn’t matter. Theo is already moving, getting himself between her and Harry, drawing his wand so that he’ll be able to cast anything he needs to. Selwyn spins, her face startled, her hand raised. The woman is on her knees but trying to spit and curse, only cries of agony keep erupting from her lips instead.

“What is going on?” Harry snaps from behind Theo, echoed by what sounds like a hiss from Lion.

Theo starts to answer, but Black and Mrs. Malfoy burst into the room then, with Draco right behind them. Theo makes sure not to catch Draco’s eye, and instead raises his wand as the woman gets one knee beneath her.

Black gestures with one arm, and a silhouette shaped like the strange woman, but red, coalesces in the air around her. It grips tighter and tighter, and Theo can see her struggling against it. It presses closer around her, and then shrinks, and then abruptly pops like a balloon. Theo jumps despite his distaste for such dramatics.

He expects to see blood all over the floor, but instead, Black bends down and picks up something from the rug. It’s small and glows red like Chaos’s firestone. Harry shifts behind him. Theo’s sure that he just reached into his pocket to make sure that _his_ stone is still with him.

Black examines the red stone, and his face turns harsh and cold in instants, probably the kind of face that got him accused of murdering a dozen Muggles. He flicks his wand out and turns to Selwyn.

“You _dared_ to bring an enemy into my home?” he snarls.

Theo turns to Selwyn, his own eyebrows rising. The oath she swore to Harry should have prevented that.

Of course, maybe it wasn’t strict enough. Theo wishes now that he’d thought to be there and supervise the giving of the oath himself.

“Of course not!” Selwyn is staring at Black, at least doing a good job of pretending that she’s stunned. “Her name is Aurora Black. She said she was a distant relative of yours, from France, and wanted to reconnect and join the struggle in Britain. I brought her because—”

“She’s my disguised cousin Bellatrix Lestrange,” Black snarls.

Theo can feel his eyes widen, and can only hope no one is watching him. He doesn’t want to be that weak. He shifts so that he’s pressing his shoulder against Harry’s. Harry presses back, but his attention remains on Black and the motionless Selwyn. Theo glances at Harry and finds his eyes narrow, the hard mask on his face that has sometimes appeared there in the weeks since Chaos’s death.

Bellatrix Lestrange was the most formidable of the Death Eaters on the battlefield. From the way he listened to his father describe her, Theo made that determination on his own. Oh, Lucius Malfoy had more money and better connections, and his own father has his beasts, but Lucius preferred to stay behind the scenes of power, and his father never revealed all his beasts could do for fear of telling his enemies about his real capabilities.

To know that she simply walked into Grimmauld Place in disguise, that she might have got close enough to hurt Harry or Black himself—which Harry wouldn’t recover from—if the wards weren’t triggered…

Theo turns to Selwyn. He can feel a cloud descending on his mind. It’s a little like the haze that happens when someone calls him “Theodore.” His hand goes down to his side, and he draws a knife. He cradles it in his palm, because, indeed, no one is looking at him. But he’s ready to strike, to kill her.

It won’t matter how strong Hecuba Selwyn is rumored to be in magic. Not when she won’t see him coming in time, and not when Theo has done enough Potions research to ensure that the poison that coats the blade needs only come close enough for someone to smell it.

“Hecuba Selwyn,” Black begins, his voice oddly resonant. Theo thinks he actually hears a bell clang somewhere in the house. “You are banished from my properties and not welcome in my house for the duration of thirty days. You will be harmed if you return before then.” He folds his arms, and the Black wards ignite around him, snarling lines of red and blue and green. Theo sighs and tugs himself back from the edge. At least Black is taking the responsibility of protecting Harry seriously.

And without even a stupid joke about his name, at that.

“Thirty days is the whole term of our alliance.” Selwyn doesn’t say it as though she’s upset about it. Theo thinks she’s too shocked to be upset. Her eyes are wide, and her voice is flat. She glances back and forth between Black and Harry. “The time that I swore my oath for.”

“Yes, and you’ll keep it better for being far away from my godson.”

“I want to ask her one thing,” Harry says, and leans forwards. It’s leaning because he’s wise enough to know that Theo’s not about to move aside for him to get closer to Selwyn, not now. “Did you know anything about Aurora Black being Lestrange when you brought her here? Anything at all?”

Theo frowns a little. That seems an odd question. It’s not as though Selwyn’s going to tell the truth, and it’s not as though they can _make_ her tell the truth.

“I thought she was a distant Black relative, and a little strange.”

Harry nearly smiles. Theo can tell from the way the shadows move on the edges of his face. “Those answers would fit Bellatrix Lestrange, too. Let me repeat. Did you even _suspect_ that she might not be who she presented herself as?”

“No.”

At the same moment she says it, Lion hisses sharply. Theo half-turns around, but Harry grabs his wrist and holds him still, shaking his head. Then he murmurs, “Would you like to repeat that answer, Ms. Selwyn?” and his voice is threatening enough to make Theo think, fleetingly, that he’s been taking lessons with Professor Snape.

“What are you talking about?” Selwyn is staring back and forth between Harry and Lion. “Why do you think I’m lying?”

“One of the things I’ve learned about Parseltongue,” Harry says smoothly, “is that it’s hard to lie in it. It’s full of emotions and sounds about emotions and words for physical states of being. Besides, most of the time snakes don’t see the _point_ of lying. Their world is prey and predators and neutral beings and rare allies, and none of them require lies.”

There’s no doubt that Selwyn is tense now. “Fascinating, but as you are the only Parselmouth in the room, I’m not sure what—”

“And,” Harry continues, removing Lion from his shoulder and holding him coiled in the palm of his hand so that Lion is leaning towards Selwyn and fluttering his wings eagerly, “there is _enough_ lying in the human world that snakes can learn to sense it in a human’s tone and scent. And communicate it to those who understand it.” He holds up Lion, his palm level with his face, his eyes locked on and blazing on Selwyn. “I’ll ask you again: did you even suspect that ‘Aurora Black’ might not be who she presented herself to be?”

Selwyn straightens her shoulders. She says, “I thought she was strange. Eccentric. I thought she might be lying about her first name. But she did know details about the Black family that convinced me.”

“And you thought that by bringing her here—”

“I didn’t know that she would hurt anyone.” Selwyn’s voice seems to get slower, the opposite of the reaction Theo would expect, and she stares stolidly at Lion. “I thought she would get an interesting reaction out of Black, and maybe out of you. And her reactions would tell me something, too. That was all. I didn’t know that she was—who she was, or that she intended to hurt you.”

Harry watches her critically, then nods. He lowers his hand, and Lion flutters his wings and curves into the air, landing on Harry’s shoulder and lashing a coil around his neck. Harry’s face is still impassive, the time it’s looked the most like that since Chaos’s death. “Thank you. We appreciate your cooperation.”

Black is gaping at Harry as if he’s sprouted wings of his own. The Greengrasses and Theo’s useless cousin and his guest are staring hard from the side. Selwyn looks as if she wants to take back half her words. Mrs. Malfoy, who’s standing behind Black, has her hand over her mouth in a way that might be meant to cover up a smile. Draco’s eyes are as wide as pools of nightshade.

Theo, on the other hand, could burst, so proud is he.

_He can be a cold bastard when he needs to be. That means, the rest of the time, he won’t need to be._

_I’m so glad that Harry was Sorted into Slytherin. I’m so glad that he came into my life._


	5. A Letter from the Ministry

“Who’s that from?”

Harry is sitting with Sirius and Remus at the breakfast table looking over their post. There was nothing for Theo, so he went outside to wander around the grounds. He says that he’s just going to look at them, but Harry thinks he’s probably searching out weaknesses in the wards, in case someone tries to attack them like Bellatrix did.

Harry wishes he wouldn’t, but it’s near-impossible to talk Theo out of anything he wants to do.

“Oh. Your _other_ guardian.” Sirius rolls his eyes and tosses the letter in a crumpled ball onto the table. “He demands that I let you return ‘home’ immediately, because of course only someone _careless_ would have let Bellatrix through the wards.” Sirius snorts. “The fact that I captured her right away and the wards took care of her doesn’t matter, of course.”

“It wouldn’t, to him,” Harry says, and stares down at the second letter he received this morning. The first one, which came in with Hedwig, is from Hermione and half about the wonderful time she’s having with her parents on a holiday to France and half about all the books she wants to read with him when she comes to visit.

“What’s that?”

It’s Remus who asks, which makes it easier to show him the heavy letter with the Ministry seal. “I don’t know. Why would someone at the Ministry for Magic be writing to me? I know that I haven’t broken the Underage Sorcery Decree or anything like that.”

Remus nods. “I would go ahead and open it, Harry. Something that was cursed to harm you couldn’t have got past the wards.”

Harry didn’t think of that, and it cheers him slightly as he opens the letter. He’s remembering now that Karkaroff’s trial for enchanting that Portkey—and interfering in the Tournament—is coming up. Maybe this letter is just going to summon him to testify in the trial.

But instead, what tumbles out looks like a legal decree. Harry picks it up and reads through it.

By the end of the first page, Lion is hissing on his shoulder and Harry is having to fist his hands in his lap because they want so badly to tremble.

“Harry? What is it?” Sirius gets up and comes around the table to sit in the chair next to Harry, one arm around his shoulders.

Harry leans against him and holds out the letter. His voice is quiet, and his mouth feels full of ashes, but he still manages to speak when he didn’t think he could, similar to the way he managed to force Selwyn to tell the truth. “They want to try me for spreading stories liable to cause a panic.”

“ _What_?” Sirius snatches the letter from him, and rips it. Harry doesn’t really care. His body is roaring with numbness and anger at the same time.

“What about?” Remus sounds calmer than Sirius, who’s muttering threats under his breath, but his eyes are a brilliant gold that Harry doesn’t remember seeing before, and his nostrils have flared.

“They said something about the stories I was telling of Voldemort’s return. _Stories_ ,” Harry says, and his hand falls into the pocket of his robes to grip Chaos’s firestone.

He can practically hear Lyassa telling him that that’s a weakness when he’s not using the stone for magic, but frankly, he doesn’t care. At the moment, it’s hold onto the stone or possibly launch accidental magic across the table and burn someone.

“Shit!” Sirius pounds a fist on the table suddenly. “That old law…” He scowls at Harry, who doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about, then at Remus. “They’re trying to get him under the Grindelwald Laws.”

Harry shakes his head. He’s aware of Grindelwald, because Severus doesn’t approve of how ignorant Harry would be of history if he just relied on Binns’s teaching, but he doesn’t know anything about laws passed during his time. “What? Do they think I’m going to cooperate with Voldemort or something?” He laughs despite himself, and then stops when he hears how bitter and grey it is.

Remus and Sirius exchange glances that say they’re worried about him, but luckily, they don’t hammer Harry with questions. Remus just says quietly, “No. It was laws passed to stop the mouths of refugees from other countries who fled to Britain and told everyone how powerful Grindelwald was. The Ministry at the time didn’t want to get _involved._ ” His eyes glare gold again. “So they declared that trying to panic people with _rumors_ of a Dark Lord was a punishable crime. They didn’t use those laws during the first war with the Death Eaters because Voldemort was everywhere and everyone knew he existed. But now…”

“Fudge doesn’t want anyone talking about Voldemort,” Sirius interrupts, his hands clenching down until Harry is surprised there’s anything of the letter left. “He’d have to deal with it, the pathetic coward. So he’s trying to silence you.”

“Arrest me,” Harry says numbly. He read that much before Sirius took the letter away from him.

Sirius nods. “There’s going to be a hearing, kiddo. Sorry.” He sighs. “And because of the nature of the Grindelwald Laws and how much Fudge is probably in a panic with not wanting you to spread this around, they can try you as an adult.” He closes his eyes. “I’m sorry. You deserve to have your voice heard, but this is going to make it difficult.”

“But they’re trying Karkaroff for making that Portkey,” Harry whispers. “They tried Marietta Edgecombe. How can they do that and then deny Voldemort is back?”

“Because both of them denied that they knew where the Portkey would take you,” Remus says. He sounds as weary as Sirius, as weary as he does after each full moon. “And that means that the only people who know the truth about what happened to you that night in the forest are you and Voldemort. I can hardly see him coming forward to testify.” Sirius snorts.

Harry recovers some of his balance with the mental image of Voldemort walking into the Wizengamot’s courtroom, and rolls his eyes. “Merlin, Fudge would faint,” he says. Then he glances back at the letter. “But if they have these laws they can use against me, and I’m going to be tried as an adult, doesn’t it mean that they’re going to send me to Azkaban?”

He would break free before anything like that happens. He knows it, and Sirius and Remus know it, too, which means that he doesn’t have to say it to them. He would run away to the Speakers’ country. He would go on the run. He would do _anything_ to avoid being trapped in that horrible prison with Dementors all around him when he has a war to fight.

Sirius shakes his head. “There are things we can do.” He stands up, his shoulders slumping a little.

Harry stares at him. “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

“There are a few things I’ll need to arrange with our allies,” Sirius says, and then hugs him so hard that Harry thinks he’ll be carrying the imprint of his godfather’s arms around on his ribs for the rest of the week. “But as distasteful as I might find some of them, I would do a _lot_ worse to protect you. Remember that, Harry.”

Harry leans against Sirius and lets him ruffle his hair. Remus comes around the table and puts a hand on his shoulder, and that gives him strength, too.

Lion hisses and rears up, weaving his neck back and forth. “ _Stupid people think they can put us in a cage. We will show the stupid people._ ”

Harry manages to smile despite himself. “ _Yes, we will_ ,” he says, and neither Sirius nor Remus flinches at the sound of the Parseltongue.

*

Severus’s hands are shaking. He ends up clasping them behind his back, because the last thing he needs now is for Harry to notice and worry about him instead of concentrating on the details of the story he’s telling. Besides, Harry might think that Severus was afraid, and want to reassure him.

Severus would not be able to express the rage rising up in him sanely, so it is as well to put it aside.

“And you have the original letter?” he asks, when Harry has stumbled to a halt. Harry is kneeling in front of Black’s Floo, his head bowed and his hair sagging around his face. It’s the only time Severus remembers that at least part of it hasn’t stood straight upright.

Harry starts and nods. “Sirius tore it, but Remus used a _Reparo_ Charm,” he murmurs. “I can owl it to you.”

“Please do. It is important that we all know the details as we prepare your legal defense.”

“Oh, you’re going to be in it, too? I thought Sirius was going to handle that.”

“You thought I would not be involved?” And Severus can feel his voice cooling and veering towards pain, as much as he tries not to let it. Did Black suggest that he would abandon Harry in his hour of need? Did he _dare_ suggest that?

“No, nothing like that.” Harry’s eyes are wide. “Only that I thought Sirius was going to handle the legal end of things. He said something about speaking to some of the Dark pure-bloods that we’re allied with.”

Severus sighed. He already regrets sending the letter demanding that Harry return after Bellatrix was exposed. He has to give up his suspicions of Black. They would only have the effect of setting Black and perhaps Harry against him.

And he has many other people to direct that rage at.

“I will be helping,” he says. “And there are other things I can do, things perhaps more appropriate for someone who has been Head of Slytherin for more than a decade.”

“You’re going to call in some favors?” Harry frowns at him. “Be careful.”

That is not what Severus means, but it is a good thing for Harry to assume. And he is touched by the concern sparking along the edges of Harry’s words. He smiles. “Believe me, I will. I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize your trial.”

“Yeah, but be careful for _yourself,_ too. I don’t need you to be careful for just me.”

Severus bows his head in recognition, murmurs, “I will see you tomorrow,” and stands. Then he turns towards his Potions lab.

He has a store of potions on hand, prepared against a circumstance such as this, but not as many as he will need. He will have to spend a large part of the afternoon brewing.

“Professor Snape? Is Harry okay?”

It’s Daphne Greengrass, peering in through the door of the room where the Floo is. Her sister is beside her, silent and wide-eyed as always. Severus nods to her. “I just spoke to him. He is all right. I assume this is about the story in the _Prophet_ this morning?” Fudge wasted no time in publishing stories of Harry being charged under the Grindelwald Laws, of course.

“Yes.” Daphne glances down at her sister and strokes her shoulder for a moment, which makes Astoria withdraw from the room. Daphne turns to Severus. “If Harry can’t protect us anymore, will you?”

Severus narrows his eyes. “So he only has usefulness to you as long as—”

Daphne shakes her head urgently, her blonde braided hair sliding off her shoulder. “I only meant that if Harry goes to Azkaban, then nothing we’ve done in the last few years matters much. For all I know, Fudge is going to come after any of Harry’s friends and allies he knows about next.” Her eyes are wide with a fear that Severus cannot fault.

And Harry would hardly want him to _deny_ the protection that he promised the Greengrass sisters would have by staying with him this summer.

Severus sighs. “I will continue to offer you the protection of this house, Miss Greengrass.”

Daphne nods, and it sounds as if her sister has almost collapsed. Then both of them turn away and go up the stairs to the rooms they have taken for their own. Severus thinks he will finally be able to go to his potions lab, but this time Mr. Zabini interrupts him.

“Does that offer apply to me as well?”

Severus studies the young man who was, perhaps, the first of his Slytherin students to befriend Harry. “Of course it does. I offered you shelter before this because of your mother. That does not change no matter what happens to Harry.”

Mr. Zabini closes his eyes. “Thank you.” Then he follows Severus to the lab, which is more than confusing. Severus pauses with his hand on the door.

“I require some private brewing time, Mr. Zabini.”

“I know about a lot of potions that Hogwarts doesn’t usually teach students,” Zabini says, and his face is so brilliant with rage that Severus is reminded forcefully that he is not the only person loyal to Harry here. “I thought I could help you. With dicing the ingredients and preparing the cauldrons, if nothing else,” he adds, when Severus starts to shake his head. “Please, sir. The article made me so _angry._ I want to do something.”

Severus considers him. Mr. Zabini is a passable Potions student, that much is true. He doesn’t have the passion that Draco does for the subject or Granger’s precision, but he has never caused an accident or created a draught that is more than a shade or two off the true color.

But still…

“If your testimony under Veritaserum were required in a certain situation, it could go badly for you.”

Zabini snorts. “Sorry, sir, I just didn’t realize that you didn’t know. Because of certain _gifts_ that my mother gave me, I’m immune to Veritaserum.”

Severus stares at him. Zabini stares back. “It’s true,” he says. “And I know that the courts in Britain are reluctant to take memories in evidence at all, because they seem to assume that everyone is a master Legilimens who can alter them. Please, sir. I won’t betray you. It won’t matter what I see or hear in the lab. I want them to _suffer._ ”

Perhaps he should not encourage such an attitude, Severus thinks as he opens the door of the lab and motions Zabini in. But he is familiar with that attitude that will become helpless frustration if someone does not take care of it. That he wants to aid a friend and cannot, because someone else will not let him.

Of course, in his case, that friend was Lily, and the person who would not let him help was _himself._

But he will not be entertaining Zabini with ancient history today. They are here to brew.

*

Blaise stares out his window, hands locked on the sill. He knows that Harry and Theo aren’t scheduled to return from Black’s house until tomorrow, but…

He wishes they were here _now._ Theo to say something clever and biting and puncture Blaise’s worries like unicorn bladders.

Harry, so that Blaise can make sure he’s safe.

Until he saw the story in the paper this morning about Fudge moving to try Harry under the Grindelwald Laws, Blaise forgot the feeling of being helpless. It’s one he experienced under his mother’s heavy hand until he grew numb to it, convinced he could do nothing but be swept along in her plans.

Befriending Harry changed things. Discovering that he has his mother’s Gift and can enchant people to do anything he wants if he’s careful enough changed things. (Even though Harry disapproves of the Gift and wouldn’t like him using it, Blaise wouldn’t hesitate if his life was in danger. Or Harry’s life).

But now, he doesn’t know what to do. It’s not as though he can walk into the Ministry, request to see Fudge, and spend the day altering the man’s mind so that he won’t try to arrest Harry or have him tried. Oh, he’d _like_ to, but he isn’t good enough at achieving a lasting effect yet, and such an abrupt change would be noticed.

 _And it’s wrong,_ says the small Harry voice that lives in the back of his head.

Blaise rolls his eyes as he slumps back on the bed and picks up the book on Charms that he put down earlier. Yes, it’s wrong, but that consideration won’t stand in the way of what he needs to do. It never has.

Meeting Harry altered his hopes and who he was loyal to, not who he is as a person.

He glances up sharply as something hits the window. For a moment, he sees the owl hovering there, its beak open, its eyes blazing with an orange fire. Then it becomes nothing but an ordinary bird again, swerving off and presumably heading to the Owlery.

Blaise closes his eyes. His mother doesn’t dare come close right now, or maybe even enchant someone to help her, given that Harry burned her badly the last time they met. But she’ll send these owls with the spell to try and terrify him.

It’s another reason Harry _has_ to stay out of prison. Professor Snape might promise to protect Blaise even if Harry is out of the picture, but Blaise doesn’t hold any illusions that the protection will be vigilant enough if Harry is gone. For one thing, Professor Snape will be distracted.

 _They_ might not admit that they regard each other as father and son, but Blaise has eyes.

So. He has to do whatever he can to affect Harry’s chances of staying free, whether that’s using his Gift, helping Professor Snape brew the obvious mind-control potions he was making this afternoon, or…

Anything else. _Anything._

He can’t go back.


	6. A Choice From a Greengrass

“Well, here we go, lad. We’ve done all we can.”

Harry nods in silence and walks forwards with Sirius at his side. Severus was afraid that he might actually murder someone if anyone taunted Harry on the way, so he’s waiting in the courtroom. He advised Harry to wear dark dress robes that aren’t one of his Hogwarts uniforms, though, so that’s what Harry did.

No one advised him to bring Lion, or one of the conjured green snakes that linger longest from the spells the Speakers have been teaching him. That was all Harry’s idea. Lion is coiled on his right shoulder like usual, while the green snake is looped around his neck.

Sirius did cough right before they went through the Floo. “Do you think you should be provoking them by bringing snakes along?”

“They’re already provoked, if you want to call it that.” Theo did tell him something similar, but the plan to bring serpents along was Harry’s own. “I want to remind them that I have magic they don’t, and that may remind them that I know things they don’t.”

Sirius blinks, then sighs. “I just hope it works, Harry. That people don’t go mad thinking that you’re You-Know-Who’s apprentice or something.”

Harry smiles to himself now as they come to a halt outside the gleaming mahogany doors of the courtroom, which are twice as tall as him, and carved with depictions of wizards and witches sitting in judgment. He actually hopes someone asks about the snakes, or his Parseltongue. He could do with the reactions to his response.

“Defendant,” says the Auror who’s waiting on the other side of the doors. Harry shoots him a quick glance. He looks a little sympathetic, but not much, and he’s a sallow man with dark eyes whom Harry doesn’t know. “You will proceed to the chair in the middle of the room and fasten the chains around your wrists.”

Harry raises his eyebrows, but he would actually be willing to do it, because the Speakers have taught him some interesting tricks to do with chains, and ropes, too. Sirius is the one who narrows his eyes and says, “That’s only legal for defendants charged with violent crimes.”

“Mr. Potter has been charged with trying to _incite_ violence.”

“Not the same thing, Jackson. And don’t forget that I _know_ you, and know the dirty little tricks you like to pull.”

“What the hell are you—”

“Why are we wasting time?” comes Minister Fudge’s high voice from the audience. “Make the defendant sit down so we can proceed with the trial.”

“There appears to be a bit of a problem with Mr. Black, sir,” says the Auror called Jackson, eyeing Sirius the way you would eye a rabid dog. Which isn’t so far off the mark, Harry has to admit.

“Mr. Black?” Harry sees a flicker of movement, and then Fudge is shoving his way down between the ranks of the robed witches and wizards in the seats that lead up to the walls, his sneer vicious and ugly. “Let me just remind _Mr. Black_ that the proof of his innocence has completely disappeared with Peter Pettigrew’s breakout from Azkaban. I’m not above ordering him returned to prison.”

There’s an audible gasp that goes around the room. Sirius looks astounded. In a minute, he’ll find some scathing words, Harry’s sure, but for mow, astounded.

Harry is the one who turns to Fudge, ignoring the way he flinches when Lion hisses, and asks, “So you didn’t save records of the trial? No testimonies from Peter Pettigrew? You couldn’t ask Sirius under Veritaserum if he was innocent? You wouldn’t take memories from people who were in the courtroom?”

“I’m talking about hard proof!” Fudge shouts. “A body! And get those things away from me!” Both Lion and the green snake have reared up now, although Lion looks more impressive because of the width of his spread wings.

“I’m just trying to understand, Mr. Fudge.” Harry smiles, and he knows there’s a hard light in his eyes and Sirius is looking at him in wonder and there’s another ripple of motion off to the side that is probably Severus shoving his way through the rapt audience. Harry doesn’t care. “You threaten my godfather’s innocence, you charge me with breaking the law even as you’re still relying on me to give testimony in Karkaroff’s trial, you accuse me of lying even as you imply that _you_ can twist the truth about Sirius’s innocence any way you like…what gives you the right to do all this?”

“Get those things away from me!” Fudge takes off his bowler hat and tries to use it to swat at Lion, but he’s far enough away that all he does is create a wind to flutter Lion’s wings. Lion twists his neck and hisses, “ _He is a great stupid one._ ”

Harry nods and raises his hand to gently touch Lion’s coils. “ _He is, and he is leading a conclave of great stupid ones._ ”

Severus comes to a halt next to him, panting, as yet another gasp travels the room. Whispers of “ _Parselmouth_ ” reach Harry’s ears, and he struggles to keep a blank expression on his face. They all _knew_ that. It was all over the papers last year that he used Parseltongue to charm a dragon (despite it mostly not being true), and before that, that he was Sorted into Slytherin when he was Sorted a second time because of his Parseltongue.

“Harry,” Sirius says in a warning tone like a growl.

“No,” Harry says, clearly enough to reach the back seats where people seem to be trying to press closer instead of further away. “He threatened me, he’s threatening you despite the weaknesses in Azkaban being _his_ fault, and he wants to pretend like he’s the innocent victim here? No. I won’t let him try to make me ashamed of what I am.”

Fudge points his hat-covered hand at him. “The weaknesses in Azkaban are not my fault! How dare you imply it?”

“Well, first my godfather escaped your inescapable prison,” Harry says, while Lion wraps his tail around Harry’s neck from one direction and the green serpent does it from the other. Harry sees Severus open his mouth as if to stop him, and then close it again. Pleased, Harry continues. “Then a bunch of Death Eaters did at the same time. All while you were Minister. One would think that you would take the warning after Sirius escaped and repair whatever holes there were in the security. But you obviously didn’t.”

Fudge stares at him. Harry doesn’t think he’s said anything to make the idiot reconsider. Fudge is just in such a towering rage that he can’t choke words past it.

Harry yawns and nods. “And now you’re charging someone who’s not even fifteen yet under the Grindelwald Laws, so that you can try me as an adult. Probably because you know that not even the _Prophet_ is going to be sympathetic to you if it comes out that you’re trying to put a fourteen-year-old in prison.”

“You—fourteen—fifteen later in the summer—” Fudge has his hat back on his head, but he’s clutching it as if a wind might blow it off at any moment.

Harry just watches, and waits. The Minister turns around to the Wizengamot finally and points at Harry with one shaking finger. “Do you see what I’m _dealing_ with? This child claims that You-Know-Who has returned, when we all know that’s impossible, and—”

“I haven’t said a word about Voldemort since I stepped into this courtroom,” Harry interrupts, and he has to admit that he enjoys the collective flinch that rustles around the room, taking the same path that the gasps did earlier. “I was talking about the unfair trial that you’re subjecting me to, and the weak prison that you’ll probably remand me to if you win, and the threats that you’ve made against my godfather—”

“Mr. Potter, please.” That’s Amelia Bones, who’s standing up and who looks pale. “I understand that you have complaints, but we need to get on with the trial.”

Harry tilts his head, knowing he looks like a curious bird, and not caring. “If you understand my complaints, why do you think the trial needs to happen?”

“Well,” Fudge says, folding his arms, “if it’s really _true_ , your stories, then I’m sure you’ll win your trial. Won’t you, Mr. Potter?”

“No,” Harry says. “That’s the genius of charging me under the Grindelwald Laws. Truth is no defense. I’m not really here to defend myself from a charge of _lying_ , even though I know that’s why you told the _Prophet._ You can decide to condemn me to Azkaban just because I’m spreading ‘stories designed to incite a panic.’ It’s interesting, and I almost respect you for choosing those laws. Or I would respect you if you weren’t trying to use your government to terrorize, you know, a fourteen-year-old _victim._ ”

Fudge turns the color of rotten fruit. Harry wonders if he was counting on Harry not to read the Grindelwald Laws that closely, or if he didn’t want the other people in the Wizengamot to understand exactly what they were voting on.

But either way, that’s what Fudge is doing. And now the murmurs from the Wizengamot sound discontented.

“I didn’t know that about the Grindelwald Laws,” says a tall woman with lots of fruit on her hat. “Is it true?”

“Yes, Madam Longbottom, it is.” Bones nods to her and turns back to Harry. “Did you _intend_ to create a panic when you spread your stories, Mr. Potter?”

“Amelia, Amelia, we agreed that I would handle the interrogation!” Fudge flaps his hands.

“Hem, hem. Perhaps I can be of some assistance.”

Harry glances to his left, and sees a squat woman in the seat next to the one Fudge stood up from. She has a pink cardigan, and a long white quill in one hand. She gives Harry a smile as sweet as Rita Skeeter’s, but Harry can see even more ill intent behind it.

Skeeter at least wants Harry to live so he can go on providing her with entertaining material for stories. Harry is sure this pink woman would be happy if he died.

And he doesn’t know how he knows that so instantly from just looking at her, but he’s sure of it.

“Yes, Dolores, what is it?” Fudge asks, turning around to look at her.

“We did indeed agree that Minister Fudge would conduct the interrogation,” this Dolores woman says, inclining her head. That reveals thin blonde hair that doesn’t make Harry like her any better. Among other things, Lion is uttering a little string of hostile hisses into his ear, ones that don’t have words. “But there is no need for an interrogation if Mr. Potter agrees to one simple truth.”

“Truth?” Harry asks.

He apparently does it sarcastically enough to irritate her, from the way she flushes. _That’s not one tenth the part of the sarcasm that I could unleash,_ Harry thinks, but he’s wise enough to keep it inside.

“Yes. If Mr. Potter was wise enough to retract his insane stories of You-Know-Who’s return and this _resurrection of the dead_ —” Dolores handles the words like something she needs to pick up with a handkerchief “—then of course there would be no need of an interrogation, because there would be no need for a trial.” She beams at him.

There’s a long silence, while everyone seems to be waiting for someone else to react.

Then Harry laughs.

It’s not actually something he planned on, and Severus clutches his arm with a tightness that’s a warning. But Harry is honestly incapable of stopping. He shakes his head back and forth, laughing, while the Dolores woman’s face grows darker and darker and Fudge actually stomps a foot.

“Stop that, stop that, Mr. Potter! You will pay this court the respect it’s due!”

“I don’t actually think trying to put me on trial and threatening my godfather when you _know_ he’s innocent deserves much respect,” Harry says, and gets the laughter under control with difficulty. “But anyway, I would be happy to provide memories of Voldemort’s resurrection.”

“False! Tampered with!” Fudge turns his head back and forth like a pleased turtle. “Everyone knows that one of your guardians is a Legilimens. Sirius Black tampered with your memories with his Black spells!”

 _Sirius?_ Harry mouths to himself. He glances at Severus, who half-shakes his head. He doesn’t want to reveal himself as a Legilimens, obviously. Especially since the man who probably gave him permission to use that kind of power on wayward students is gone from the Headmaster’s position.

“Everyone knows that the Black family teaches all its children Legilimency! And memory tampering!”

Sirius interrupts with a snort. “I don’t know either, or I could have protected myself from the Dementors. So if you could just bring a Pensieve—”

“ _You-Know-Who has not returned!_ You are not going to spread your mad stories!”

“And if the boy is mad,” says the Dolores woman with a titter, “how can we trust anything he says? The poor dear has memories and moral values and _everything_ skewed out of true. The poor boy.”

“There’s that, of course there’s that!” Fudge brightens and turns towards the Wizengamot. “You can find the boy innocent even under the Grindelwald Laws if you declare him mentally incompetent! And we can make sure that he’s placed with a new guardian who won’t _encourage_ this sort of rashness!”

“I would be happy to volunteer,” purrs the Dolores thing.

“This has been amusing,” says a cold voice most of the way up the Wizengamot gallery. “But aren’t you making a mistake, Cornelius?”

Harry squints. He can make out a woman who’s standing up in heavy robes, but it’s not until Fudge says, “What are you saying, Adele?” that he knows who it must be. Adele Greengrass, one of those “allies” Sirius was touting.

Harry mostly put them out of his mind after Selwyn’s attempted betrayal. He certainly didn’t expect one of them to speak up for him now.

“For example,” Adele Greengrass says, tilting her head as if she’s trying to get a better look at Harry herself, “you’ve now threatened the young man’s godfather _twice,_ once with prison and once with losing custody of him. And you’ve also threatened the Head of Slytherin House and the Potions professor at Hogwarts. If you give them no other options, then I’d watch out for poison in your food or one of those infamous curses the Black family is capable of. I really would, Cornelius.”

Fudge splutters and glances at Severus and Sirius both. Severus remains motionless. Sirius stares back at Fudge with a glare that Harry recognizes as his “Azkaban look,” the one he uses when he wants to intimidate someone with his mad reputation.

Fudge looks more afraid of Severus anyway, which is the first sign of common sense Harry’s seen from him. “I—I only meant—”

“Not to mention,” Greengrass goes on in a voice that’s probably won her prizes in boredom competitions, “that you don’t actually _have_ the legal power to have Harry Potter declared mentally incompetent or retry his godfather. You would have to declare him innocent under the Grindelwald Laws or at the least drop the charges, then reconvene the Wizengamot on a different date. We’re here to try Mr. Potter on the charge of spreading seditious stories. That has nothing to do with custody issues or his mental incompetence.” She sighs and stares at Harry as if she’s never met him before in her life.

Harry is impressed with her acting, but he’s also wondering how much she’s like her brother, Daphne and Astoria’s father. If they’re similar, then he can understand a lot more about why the Greengrass girls wanted to spend the summer with him.

“We—we cannot declare him innocent when he’s claiming a Dark wizard that never even _existed_ was resurrected!” Fudge says, leaping into a new stupid groove. “What was You-Know-Who’s name before it was You-Know-Who? There are no records of him! Mr. Potter wants us to somehow take this monster seriously and fight him, but how _can_ we when we have no idea of where he came from or what he’s capable of—”

“Excuse me, Minister.”

Harry blinks and looks up. Headmistress McGonagall is standing near a chair on the other side of the room. Next to her are a few people Harry recognizes from the Triwizard Tournament. Presumably they’re here as witnesses. Harry’s a little alarmed he didn’t see them before, but Fudge _was_ taking most of his attention.

“Yes, Headmistress? Is what you have to say relevant?”

Harry isn’t the only person in the room to wince, which makes him wonder how many people here were Gryffindors while McGonagall was the Head of House. But aside from her eyes narrowing and her voice getting a little colder, she might not have heard Fudge’s insult. “We _do_ actually know You-Know-Who’s mortal name. I learned it a week or so ago, from one of the past Headmasters’ portraits, and have been doing research to corroborate it. It is Tom Marvolo Riddle; everything I’ve been able to find confirms that. He was a student at Hogwarts in the 1930s and 1940s, and Head Boy in his seventh year. Then he went to work in Knockturn Alley for a time, and then he left to travel the world. Supposedly, he vanished while doing that. But in truth, he had become Volde—”

“ _Don’t say it_!” Fudge yells.

Professor McGonagall pauses, but regards Fudge with a look so severe that Harry has to smile. “Will you let me present my evidence, Minister? That is, assuming you can agree on the purpose of this trial at all? Am I to give evidence about what I saw the night Mr. Potter was Portkeyed away, or about You-Know-Who’s true identity?”

Fudge is glancing around with a look so panicked that Harry is pretty sure he knows he’d lose. The members of the Wizengamot are shifting and whispering among themselves, not glaring at Harry in the seeming unity they had when he walked into the room.

Fudge straightens and snaps, “We are trying Harry Potter under the Grindelwald Laws. And you _will_ find him guilty, or—”

“Or what, Fudge?” Madam Longbottom is on her feet again, one hand clapping on her tall hat so it doesn’t tip off her head. “Are you going to tell _me_ what to do?”

Harry smiles as the mood of the room changes again. He thinks they can allow the trial to go ahead now. Fudge isn’t going to get anything like the unanimous verdict he was hoping for.

He does catch Adele Greengrass’s eye as he sits down in the defendant’s chair—where the chains don’t move to catch his wrists—and nods a little. She nods back before she sits back down and resumes her bored stillness.

And the trial begins.


	7. Decimation

Adele observes critically as the boy settles into the defendant’s chair. She thought he would object more, and she might have to add her voice to that objection, to uphold her roles as protector of the Wizengamot’s processes and secret Potter ally. But Potter sits there, with the snakes balanced on his shoulders, and makes it look like a throne.

And he ignores the chains. Adele is reluctantly impressed. There aren’t that many people who can do that.

Potter fastens his gaze straight ahead, at Amelia Bones, who nods to him and then yields the interrogation to Fudge, as they evidently agreed on. Adele thinks Bones weak for making that deal, but then, too much adherence to justice and truth _does_ do that to one.

“Now, Harry,” Fudge says, and leans forwards with a sickly-sweet smile that Dolores probably couldn’t have bettered. “Do you need to keep those creatures in here with you?”

“Sorry, Minister, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Your snakes, of course! They would certainly be better off _outside_ the courtroom, don’t you agree?”

Potter manages the feat of looking utterly blank, then says, “Oh, of course, I didn’t realize the courtroom was an animal-free zone. But in that case, you’ll also have to put your pet talking toad outside. I wouldn’t want anyone to ask me if the Minister for Magic saw himself as above the rules, after all.”

More than one gasp travels the room. The Wizengamot likes doing that. Normally, Adele despises them, but this time, she blinks. Well. She didn’t expect Potter to be _that_ daring.

“Mr. _Potter_! That is an insult to Madam Umbridge!” Fudge looks as if he’d like to pull off his hat and eat it.

“I didn’t mean to insult her.” Potter shrugs. “The same way I’m sure that you didn’t mean to insult my serpents by calling them _creatures._ ”

The serpents on his shoulders hiss in unison. The winged snake with golden scales is drawing most of the attention, but Adele keeps her eye on the small green one coiled on Potter’s left shoulder. Honestly, she recognizes that particular breed, a dream adder, and wonders how Potter got one. They’re almost extinct the world over, and none live in Britain.

“You must put your snakes out of the courtroom!”

“Of course, Minister. I’m just waiting for you to do the same with your toad.”

Black, seated behind Potter, looks as if he’s about to collapse with laughter. Adele holds in a sigh. Black’s bloodline is such that it makes him the natural leader of their alliance, and of course there’s his position as Potter’s godfather to consider. But Adele wishes that someone more, well, _serious_ was in charge.

“Madam Umbridge is not a creature!”

“Neither are my snakes. But if she’s able to stay, so can they.”

Fudge simply doesn’t know what to do. Adele folds her hands in her lap and watches with every appearance of boredom, which is more needed now than ever. But she has to admit that she’s struggling to fight back laughter.

 _Strange._ She can’t remember the last time that happened to her, let alone in the Wizengamot courtroom.

Fudge finally decides retreat is the better part of valor, and mutters, “Fine. The snakes can stay. Now, Mr. Potter, we’re here to try you under the Grindelwald Laws for spreading stories of sedition. Why did you do it?”

“I didn’t.”

Adele pauses, wondering if her opinion of Potter’s intelligence has become inflated. She thought he was smart. A flat denial isn’t going to work in this situation, and he should have known that. Black looks a little concerned, too, sitting up.

“Then what did you think were doing?”

“Telling the truth.”

Fudge whuffles like a hungry Jarvey—and takes the bait, Adele realizes after a second. “You’re not telling the _truth_!”

 _He shouldn’t have said that,_ Adele thinks distantly, her eyes on Severus Snape now. There’s a man who must be implicitly part of the alliance, since he’s Harry Potter’s other guardian, but Adele hasn’t interacted directly with him. She would like to meet him. _He should have just said that truth is no defense under the Grindelwald Laws, which it isn’t._

“Would you like to question me under Veritaserum?” Potter asks, and his eyes open very wide, as if he’s trying to show everyone involved the tunnels that lead into his empty brain. It _must_ be empty, Adele thinks, staring at him in disbelief. How could he make an offer like that? Fudge will be free to ask whatever he wants, including questions that make Potter look bad.

“Harry!” Black snaps from behind the boy, apparently having come to the same conclusion.

“Hush, Sirius,” Potter says, confident and calm in a way that makes Adele wish she knew what was going on. She hasn’t been this jolted back and forth in her own mind in—decades, probably. “Listen to me. I’m sure that Mr. Fudge has very important reasons for asking me questions, and I want to be sure that he knows I’m not walking around spreading seditious stories for the fun of it. I want him to know that the truth is important.”

Fudge hesitates, apparently grasping onto the suspicion that he might be being tricked about this. But Potter just stares with that wide, empty gaze—that Adele is suddenly certain is no longer empty—and then Fudge nods and falls into the trap, turning and calling for Veritaserum.

The only problem, Adele thinks, as she sits back in her seat and tries to catch her breath, is that she can’t see any way Potter can escape this. He _is_ going to be tried, and he _is_ going to be asked questions that he doesn’t want to answer. So the trap might turn on the one setting it.

Yet, for all that, Adele can feel her breathing quickening, and her lips parting, and she even ignores the curious glances a few people in her row of seats cast her. If anyone asks, she’ll just tell them the truth, which is that _Something is happening in the Wizengamot at last._

*

_The boy is lying._

That conviction is the only one that keeps Dolores in her seat as one of the Aurors strides out of the courtroom to fetch the Veritaserum, and the _stupid_ boy leans back in the defendant’s chair as if he controls everything here.

_He’s lying._

He must be, because there is no way that the Dark Lord has come back to life, Dolores thinks, and rubs her arms where gooseflesh has sprung up. She drops her hands when she sees the people around her staring at her, and does her best to ignore their judging eyes.

Her _friend_ in the shadows would have alerted her if You-Know-Who was back. That’s the truth of it. And Dolores trusts her friend far more than she trusts Potter or any of the people who support him, like that smirking Black.

The Auror comes back with the Veritaserum, and Potter sits up and turns towards him. Dolores is hoping for a flash of fear, some sign that Potter has underestimated all of them and will now have to give that up and accept that he was wrong, that he is going to be _trampled_ and his secrets ripped out of him.

But he doesn’t act like that at all. In fact, he tilts his head back and opens his mouth, extending his tongue.

Dolores watches critically as the Auror drips the three drops onto Potter’s tongue. Potter blinks, and his eyes grow glassy. Dolores frowns. She was trying to determine if the Aurors were in league with Potter and wouldn’t give him the real potion. After all, it’s not as though they’ve treated him with the contempt any other criminal would be given in his position. Dolores has heard about how they practically fawned on him during the trial of that poor Edgecombe child who was only acting out her frustration and disappointment at being left out of Potter’s study group.

Cornelius seems satisfied, though. He nods and leans forwards to inspect Potter, then asks, “What is your name?”

“Harry James Potter.”

 _He at least_ sounds _like he’s under it,_ Dolores has to concede.

“And where do you live?”

“It’s split between Number Twelve Grimmauld Place and the house Professor Snape and I share.”

That’s true, too, from what Dolores has been able to find according to his Ministry records. She scowls down at Potter, who keeps staring past her in a way that probably has to do with the potion but feels like a personal insult anyway.

“Who are your guardians?”

“Sirius Black and Professor Severus Snape.”

Both of the men shift behind Potter as if they can make themselves bigger and spare the boy the consequences of his actions. Dolores sniffs. Do neither of them realize how much _trouble_ they are in? Or Potter is in?

Then again, she has found that people who despise and flout the power of the Ministry rarely do.

“Now tell us what happened on the night that you touched a Portkey and vanished from Hogwarts.”

“I was taken to a forest.” Potter’s voice remains stripped flat, which makes Dolores scowl. His tale is ridiculous, but it will sound more convincing to a lot of people because the tone he’s telling it in _sounds_ like he’s under Veritaserum. “In the forest were Lucius Malfoy and Voldemort.” Everyone flinches, and Dolores clutches her wand tighter. “They used me to give Voldemort a better body. Before, he just had one that he was assembling from scraps of flesh and muscle that he got from people and animals he ate. They flayed me—”

“Then how are you still alive?” Cornelius asks, and Dolores nods. It’s a clever question.

“They used a spell that stripped me of layers of skin a little at a time, and wound them around Voldemort’s body.” Another flinch, but Dolores sits straight up and stared around, daring anyone to look back at her. _She_ isn’t going to flinch. “But they were going to kill me, I think. Then my dragon came. She transformed herself into pure light, and she breathed fire on Lucius Malfoy. She killed him. She didn’t manage to kill Voldemort, but I don’t know how much can kill him when he’s like that. Then she flew me back to Hogwarts, and dissolved into light and fire, and vanished.”

There’s a long murmuring that seems to spiral up one side of the courtroom and down another. Dolores listens, but even though she’s had a lot of practice at listening in Wizengamot sessions, she can’t tell where it starts and stops and comes from.

 _Who is against us? Who believes this maniacal child_?

“And do you believe that Karkaroff and Edgecombe knew the truth about the Portkey?”

“No. Edgecombe just wanted revenge on me. Karkaroff was an idiot to trust someone who sent him the Portkey. He was determined to have a real challenger to Viktor Krum in the Tri-Wizard Tournament.”

 _Then Edgecombe shouldn’t have been punished the way she was._ But Cornelius is going on rather than turning back to Dolores so she can have the chance to air her opinion, the way she hoped she would. “And what do you think of the Ministry? What would it take to get you on our side?”

Potter opens his mouth, but instead of words, a long hiss comes out. Everyone jerks back, except Dolores. She knew there was a possibility of this. Her friend has warned her that the snake-creatures, the snake-speakers, are trying to sneak back into the magical world that disposed of them long ago. It’s the role of creatures like her _friend_ to protect wizards and witches from such things.

And Potter is on the side of the snake-creatures, or he wouldn’t be able to speak their disgusting language.

“Answer the question!” Cornelius demands. Dolores knows he’s sweating with fear without even seeing his face, just from the way that his hands clutch his bowler hat.

But because the demand isn’t actually a question, Potter sits still and keeps staring ahead. Cornelius stomps up to him and demands, “What will it take to get you on our side and make you stop speaking against me?”

A hiss.

“What will it to take to make you _stop saying he’s back_?” And Cornelius reaches out as if he’s going to grip the boy’s shoulder and shake him, a harmless enough punishment, surely. Dolores would do worse, herself.

Snape seizes his hand and holds it prisoner for a moment, before releasing it. Cornelius steps back, rubbing his wrist and shaking.

Potter hisses again.

Dolores raises her hand, and then speaks, because poor Cornelius is facing in the wrong direction and can’t see her. “I say that the child has violated the terms of his bargain with this court,” she says, and makes sure to keep her voice calm and sweet. “He promised to answer the questions, under Veritaserum, and he is not.”

“Of course he is,” Black says, his eyes gleaming. “He’s just answering them in Parseltongue.”

“How do we know that? How do we?” Cornelius’s hands are white on the edges of the hat now, and Dolores can feel her own head nodding, her own lips pulling back from her teeth. She doesn’t care who sees her like this. Agreeing with the Minister is a good political move, always. “We need someone who can speak the language.”

“I don’t know of anyone who would be willing to translate, if you don’t trust that my ward is telling you the truth.” Professor Snape looks bored. “Do you, Minister?”

“Of course! You-Know-Who—”

The words hang in the air, and Dolores slumps back with a frustrated hiss of her own. She doesn’t need to see Cornelius’s face to know that he’s lost. The moment he proclaimed that he believed Potter, he lost the game. If he believes the stories of You-Know-Who’s return for himself and reacts without panic, then he’s saying that Potter is right to spread them, and they’re not sedition.

And more, he’s accepted Potter’s testimony under Veritaserum. If he had ignored the offer to testify that way or not accepted the stories as truth, he could continue charging Potter under the Grindelwald Laws. But not now.

_Perhaps sometimes it isn’t wise to be on the same side as the Minister, after all._

*

Harry sighs with relief as the antidote pours down his throat and the enforced calm of Veritaserum snaps away from him. He’s glad _that’s_ done with. He dislikes the potion immensely. He hopes he’ll never have to take it again, but then stops hoping. It’s ridiculous to spend time thinking about something that he _knows_ won’t come true.

And his little trick had worked. Working with the Speakers has made him much more conscious when he’s switching between English and Parseltongue. If he chooses, he can speak in either language even with something like Veritaserum pulling at his tongue and compelling his answers.

He can’t resist the truth potion. He could feel from the tension between Sirius and Severus that when he accepted being dosed with it, they thought he would spill secrets to Fudge that they wouldn’t want heard.

Harry stands up, touching Lion and listening with a smile to the winged snake’s snide little song of triumph. The green serpent he called from magic will be dismissed when he leaves. They were here as a last-ditch defense, as a reminder of power, and as a way to remind himself of Parseltongue just in case, but he didn’t need them for that third purpose. He really _can_ hiss without looking at an image of a snake, now.

“I want to talk to you, Harry.”

Severus’s voice splinters like breaking ice. Harry nods and waves to Sirius as he walks towards the courtroom door. The Wizengamot session didn’t last very long after Fudge inadvertently admitted that he _does_ think Voldemort is back. All of the wizards and witches except Fudge and that creepy Umbridge woman voted to acquit Harry from the charges under the Grindelwald Laws, and that’s that.

The minute they get out into the corridor, Severus casts a privacy spell that Harry knows from experience will surround them with a hazy, wavering dome, and prevent anyone else from looking through it. Then he spins back towards Harry with narrowed eyes.

Harry stares back, and strokes Lion’s wing when he rears up with a hiss of, “ _Don’t challenge us_!” He doesn’t hiss reassurance to Lion, though. He knows that would be the wrong move right now.

“Did you know that you could resist Veritaserum?” Severus demands.

“I wasn’t resisting it. I did answer his questions, just in Parseltongue.”

“But you knew you could do that?”

“Of course, sir. I wouldn’t have offered to let him put me under Veritaserum otherwise.”

For a moment, Severus’s fingers clench, maybe because Harry has retreated to his title. But Harry can’t help it. It’s the stern Professor Snape in front of him at the moment, much more than his guardian.

“I wish,” Severus finally whispers, opening his eyes, “that you would have _told_ me.”

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, and consciously keeps himself from saying _sir_ again. “I thought that you wouldn’t react with the right amount of fear and worry otherwise, and I knew there would be people in the courtroom watching you. It had to be real.”

Severus stares at him. “So you walked into that room with a plan and you kept it from me—and Black?”

Harry hears the question, and nods. “Sirius didn’t know about it, either. I promise,” he adds gently, when Severus looks as if he would rather break something than accept what Harry is saying.

“You should have trusted us to protect you.”

“I’ve been trusting you to do that for a long time now,” Harry says, looking him in the eye. “But I have to be able to protect myself, too, Severus. And I have to be able to have clever plans and act convincingly. I won’t be able to defend myself from political danger otherwise.”

After a long, tense moment, when Harry thinks that perhaps he’ll have to explain and apologize again, Severus nods. And then he steps forwards, and loops his arm around Harry’s shoulders.

Even behind a privacy charm, this is probably the closest he’ll come to an embrace in the Ministry. Harry sighs, and leans softly against him, and lets himself be escorted away.


	8. Training

“Picture, as hard as you can, that spotted tail you saw in the mirror.”

Black’s voice is a little doubtful, the way it has been since Theo started the Animagus training with him, but by now, Theo has learned not to hold it against him. He closes his eyes and drifts into the center of his mind, the center of his chest, the warm power that lies coiled there. It’s the power that Theo associates with his ability to transform, the leopard within him.

He might be wrong. But so far, he’s had the best results when he pictures himself hovering in or above it.

“Now, picture your left arm changing. Just a tiny portion. The portion from the elbow to the place we marked earlier.”

That _is_ a small place, only a few centimeters long. But Theo knows this is the right way to begin. He won’t be able to handle the large changes if he can’t do the small ones, no matter how minuscule they are.

He breathes through the urge to reach faster, reach _more_ , and floats the bubble of warmth from the center of his chest to that spot on his arm. The place that Black marked with a red line from his wand tingles as if it’s become a wound. Theo ignores the temptation to open his eyes, and instead, pictures spotted fur as hard as he can. He’s spent hours now with books that have moving pictures of leopards, and even owl-ordered Muggle books from the few shops in wizarding Britain that sell them.

He knows what leopards look like. The golden fur, and the shape of the rosettes that distinguishes them from cheetahs and jaguars, and the slim bodies, and the way their fangs show when they open their mouths.

The slender legs.

Theo believes, as hard as he can, that the center of the spot on his arm is actually the long, slim line of a leopard’s leg.

“Holy shit!”

Theo loses concentration on the image of a leopard leg as his eyes snap open, and he glares at Black. But Black is staring at his arm. Reluctantly, Theo looks. He knows he hasn’t achieved the transformation, and—

His thoughts stop, the way they tend to do when Harry is in danger.

There’s a glowing, perfect patch of golden fur in the middle of his arm, with a single black spot in the middle of _it_ like a flower growing in soft dirt.

Even as Theo watches, it dissolves, and ordinary human skin comes back underneath it. But he can’t stop his quickening breathing or the feeling of elation zipping through him. He turns to Black, and smiles, but his smile dissolves once he sees the _stare_ on Black’s face.

“What is it?” he demands.

“You—I never thought you would be able to achieve that much this fast.”

“Then why try to encourage me in Animagus training?”

“Because you’re Harry’s friend, and he’s my godson.”

Well, all right, that makes sense in the simplistic world of Gryffindors, Theo has to admit. Just because no true Slytherin would have given that answer…

But he’s put a lot less stock in what “true Slytherins” would do since he got to know Harry. He straightens his back. “So it’s a good thing that I managed to concentrate this much and get part of my arm to transform?” he asks. _Even if it’s a small part?_ But he won’t say that, because he’ll be damned if he shows any weakness to Black.

“Of course it’s good! It’s great!” Black is still staring at him with wide eyes. “None of us—I mean, Harry’s father and our other friends—managed the transformation that fast! And you’ve only been concentrating for a few days!”

Theo nods politely. He knows the tale of how Black and his friends, including the traitor, became Animagi, because they wanted to help Remus Lupin through the full moons. He privately thinks that they probably didn’t have as overriding a reason as he does. Lupin was in trouble from a curse that he’d already borne for most of his life.

Harry is in trouble for so much more, and Theo wants to become an Animagus to protect him from that.

“Should I try again?” he asks.

“Hmm.” Black scrutinizes him for a moment, and Theo experiences an odd, uncomfortable feeling. It’s the first time that an adult man has studied him with true interest in…perhaps a decade. His father hardly counts, of course. And Professor Snape has studied him that way, but he was evaluating how well Theo was doing in Potions or how well he could defend Harry, not—

Whatever Black is looking for.

“Do you feel warm around the ears?” Black asks, in a strangely professional tone. “Do you feel as if there’s a bubble swelling beneath the surface of your skin and it’s about to burst?”

Theo considers it carefully, but in the end, he shakes his head. He feels normal. “Am I supposed to feel those things?”

“No.” Black, for some reason, looks a little sad. “That would mean that you were concentrating too much, and you should rest and let your magic subside for a little while. But if you’re fine, then you can go back to concentrating and try to transform that part of your arm again. Just that, nothing else.”

Theo nods. Black is being overly-cautious, he thinks, which isn’t something the man is known for, but then again, Black probably thinks that he’ll have to answer to Harry if he hurts Theo. Not something he wants to do.

Theo closes his eyes and drifts back into the warmth at the center of his chest, reaching out and finding the magic that lives in him.

The leopard that lives in him, and will kill in defense of his friend.

*

“ _Then the training we gave you was useful._ ”

Harry nods and smiles slightly at Lyassa as he watches the green adders that he called out of nowhere, the same kind as the serpent that he took to the Wizengamot trial, coiling up his arm. Two more of them are doing a slow-motion parody of battle on the floor, striking at each other so that he can see their motions instead of missing them in the blurring quickness. “ _It was. I didn’t have to answer the questions that would have embarrassed me because I was responding in Parseltongue, and there is no one here except me who understands it now._ ”

“ _And us._ ”

Harry looks up to find Lyassa swaying in place, as if she wants to echo the green serpents that are sparring on the floor. “ _Of course_ ,” he says slowly, blinking a little. “ _But I thought that you didn’t count yourselves because you don’t really live in the real world._ ”

“The human world,” Lyassa corrects instantly, and Harry sits up. She only uses English when she wants to make some point that she considers really important. “Not the real one. There are many real worlds, and you will cripple your education irreparably if you bind yourself to thinking of this as the only real one.”

“All right,” Harry says, blinking a little. He can see the sense in that, even though he hasn’t given much thought to the world the Speakers live in. They’ve wanted him to visit it, but Harry resisted, first because they just assumed and then because he has enough trouble living in this one. “What about the world that Voldemort lives in?”

“ _The world of madness._ ”

“ _Would it make sense for me to try and understand it so that I can fight him better_?” Harry asks, slipping back into Parseltongue because Lyassa has.

Lyassa studies him for long enough that Harry begins to wonder uneasily what he did wrong. She inspires that in him, while the other Speakers that come to talk to him on a regular basis, Asheren and Rizzen, don’t.

“ _In the end? No._ ” Lyassa’s tail snaps from side to side even though her head doesn’t move. Harry is used to interpreting that as a sign of aggression, but it doesn’t really look that way right now. Lyassa is just busy thinking about something. “ _In the end, this war is not the most important thing in your life. Entering the world of madness would carry a high risk of never returning, something you do not want._ ”

“ _I thought you believed defeating Voldemort was the most important thing I could be doing, though? It’s the reason you’re helping me. You call him the corrupt Parselmouth._ ”

“ _And he is. But the most important thing we are doing here is aiding you._ ”

“ _To defeat Voldemort._ ”

“ _To live your life._ ”

That is something Harry hasn’t considered. He blinks and sits back in the middle of the floor, while the green serpents crawl towards him and Lion hisses softly in his ear, worried about him but on the edge of understandable words rather than actually speaking them.

“ _Did you think that you would have no life after him_?”

“ _Well, most of the time, I think that’s what’s going to happen, because I’ll die fighting him,_ ” Harry says. He’s glad they’re speaking Parseltongue right now. Severus has been keeping a close eye on him since the hearing, apparently under the impression that Harry will try another stunt without informing him of it, and he would be upset to hear Harry talking about his death.

“ _Do not give up._ ” Lyassa slithers towards him, her eyes narrowed and her fangs visible for a moment as her lips open wider than usual. Most of the time, Speakers don’t do that, because Parseltongue doesn’t require lips. “ _I would be most offended to think that we had wasted all this time teaching our magic to someone who is suicidal._ ”

“ _I’m not suicidal! I’m practical. I want to live. I just don’t think I will._ ”

Lyassa pauses and seems to think about that. Harry sits there with his heart pounding hard and a flush mounting in his cheeks. It’s—not something he wants to admit to his friends, but yeah, in his harder moments, it’s something that just feels realistic to him.

“ _Then we shall have to teach you ways to keep your hope alive._ ”

Harry wrinkles his nose. That’s something that sounds a little silly to him, although he doesn’t want to say so to Lyassa, who will probably take offense. “ _Are there magical ways of doing that_?”

Lyassa laughs softly, and her tail twitches across the floor. “ _There are magical ways of doing_ everything. _Let me think about it, and then we will come up with a way that will work to help you._ ”

*

“Are you—I know that you can’t tell us everything that happens in the magical world, Hermione. But is it true what that paper you got this morning said? There’s a war?”

Hermione takes a deep breath and turns to face her mum and dad across the breakfast table. Her dad is letting her mum take the lead, which tells Hermione that they’ve probably planned out this entire conversation, including what to do if she says yes. It drives her mad, since she doesn’t need to be _handled_ like this, but it also reminds her how strongly her parents see her as a child. Even though she’s nearly sixteen!

“There’s not really a war, _yet_ ,” Hermione says. She’ll try being honest with them first, and see how it goes. “But the man who was in charge of leading the last war has come back, so another one will be starting soon.”

“Come back?”

“You remember that you read that history book before my first year, Mum? The one about—” Hermione braces herself “— _Voldemort_ and the war he led? And how he was stopped by my friend Harry?”

Her parents exchange blank glances for a moment, and then her father laughs softly. “I remember that—that was a book of stories, though.”

“No. It was a history book.”

Again the exchange of glances. Hermione feels a throb of envy travel through her. She doesn’t wish she was a Muggle, magic is her life, but she does wish that she had the bond her parents do with someone.

Her mum leans towards her and takes Hermione’s hand across the table. “But you don’t _really_ believe that he did something to stop this man?”

Hermione finds herself absurdly glad that her mother doesn’t speak Voldemort’s name, and shoves the feeling away. She’ll have to get used to it, and saying it, despite the way that she wants to flinch away from it. “I mean, he was a baby, so I think it was probably his mother. She died to save him. But he did _something._ Voldemort got torn out of his body and didn’t come back until last year. And Voldemort wants to kill Harry.”

There. She said it, and nothing happened. Hermione can’t help feeling that she’s chipping away at something inside herself, something that was preventing her from being as strong as she could be.

“That’s—that’s mental, Hermione.” Her father shakes his head. “People don’t get disembodied and then come back. Mothers dying to protect their children is an admirable thing, of course, but it doesn’t provide some kind of supernatural protection.”

Hermione stares flatly at him. “ _Dad._ You’ve seen people transform into animals in front of you now, and when we went to Diagon Alley last year, you saw people changing the color of their clothes and conjuring quills and shrinking packages with a tap of their wands. You _know_ magic is real.”

“Not this kind. It doesn’t _happen,_ Hermione.”

Hermione is about to snap that she’s not lying, and neither is Harry, when she pauses. Her father’s forehead is sweaty, and he rubs his hands together quickly before he hides them under the table. Hermione’s only seen that before when her mother’s parents, whom her father really doesn’t like, come over to visit.

_He’s arguing because he’s afraid and he doesn’t want it to be real. Not because he doesn’t really believe me._

“It did happen, Dad,” she says, as gently as she can. “This is the magical world. And unfortunately, a lot of people sit back and wait for someone else to save them. In the 1940s, they waited for Dumbledore to save them from Grindelwald, who was the Dark Lord at the time. And now they’re depending on Harry to save them from Voldemort.”

“And you?”

“I’m not sitting back and depending on Harry to save me!”

“But you’re standing next to him.” Her mother’s eyes are wide with fear, and she squeezes Hermione’s hand so hard that Hermione swallows back a huge lump in her throat. “That means that you’re going to be a target as well, doesn’t it? And people hate you because you have non-magical parents. I know that I read part of that in a book that _was_ history.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Hermione says, and squares her shoulders. She knows her parents will panic about this, and she tries to ignore the little voice whispering in her head that she only has a little more than a year, and then she’ll be an adult in the wizarding world and they can’t stop her. Hopefully it will never come to that; they’ll just accept that she’s doing what she has to do, and even fighting in self-defense.

“Aren’t you afraid?” Her parents exchange one of those silent-speaking glances again. “You’re not a soldier.”

“But I’m Harry’s friend, and I’m Muggleborn,” Hermione says. “You didn’t raise me to sit back and refuse to participate, anyway.”

“No, but—someone else could do it. Adults.”

“There are some adults I’ve told you about who are fighting,” Hermione said quietly. “Headmistress McGonagall, who took over when Dumbledore got arrested, and Professor Snape and Mr. Black, who are Harry’s guardians.”

“But there’s no army?”

Hermione shakes her head. “No, but I promise you, if we lose the war, it won’t be safe for me anyway. And I trust Harry, and I trust the other people who are on our side. And—” She swallows again. “Harry, he defeated Voldemort, I told you. I think he could rally support to his side if he tried. He just hasn’t tried yet.”

“I saw that story in the paper, though.” Her mum pulls her hand back to fold her arms, and Hermione tucks her own hand beneath the table and tries not to show how cold it feels. “The Ministry of Magic doesn’t believe your friend. They’ll probably get in the way and hamper any effort he could make to raise an army.”

“That’s probably true. But we’re going to fight anyway.”

“Doomed last stands are all very well in history and poetry,” her father says quietly. “But I don’t want you involved in one in real life, Hermione.”

Hermione starts to open her mouth, and Mum snorts abruptly. “Now you’ve done it, Jason. Put her back up. She’ll lie to our faces about what she intends to do and then go off and do it anyway.”

“But it’s _dangerous._ She’s never lied to us about something dangerous!”

Hermione can feel herself blushing, but she doesn’t think her parents can see it. _The basilisk and the troll,_ she thinks, and is intensely glad that Muggles don’t know Legilimency. “Um,” she says. “I want to help Harry. He’s my friend. I don’t have so many of those.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Mum says in the kind of caressing tone she used when Hermione was a child to tell her about how she was just too intelligent for the other kids and that wasn’t a bad thing and she would find the perfect friends someday.

“I know, I know,” Hermione says impatiently. “But—Mum, Dad, I _don’t_ want to lie to you. But if you try to keep me from going back to Hogwarts, then I’ll sneak out behind your backs. And if you try to keep me from fighting in the war, then I won’t tell you what I’m doing. And in a little over a year, I’ll be an adult in the wizarding world, and you can’t stop me. I’m sorry,” she adds miserably, because she’s never seem then look more shocked. “But that’s the way it is. That’s the way it _will_ be. Harry needs me. And I want to. It’s the right thing to do.”

Her parents give each other yet another silent, speaking glance. Then her father says, “If your friends don’t have an army—”

“And most of these wizards who fight on the other side have no idea how to move around in the Muggle world because they don’t have Muggle parents—”

“No, they don’t,” Hermione says, wondering where they’re going with this.

“Then,” Mum says, and draws herself up like she’s about to charge into battle, without a wand, “we’ll help you. We don’t have magic, but there are things we can do. Muggle things.”

Her father nods. “Like moving you around in _our_ world and giving you safe places to hide. Buying things that will help you. Collecting information. There—has to be some way to do that.” He blinks rapidly and pushes his glasses up his nose. His hand is shaking, but Hermione knows that determined expression on his face. She got it from him. “We’ll help.”

Hermione stands up, tears flowing down her face, and runs around the table to hug them. They hug her back.


	9. Dark Star

Sirius’s eyes snap open. He turns around and finds himself almost tumbling out of the bed, his fingers closing hard in the blankets twined around his legs.

“Sirius?” Remus’s voice comes from down the corridor, with a low buzz of exhaustion behind it.

“Sorry,” Sirius says automatically, even as he forces himself up on his hands and knees. There’s a tingle going down his spine, and a beating gong inside his head that’s a clap behind the beat of his heart.

The last time he felt something like this, Bellatrix came through the Floo.

“Padfoot, what’s going on?” Remus sticks his head around the corner of the doorframe, and Sirius forces himself to ignore the very nice bare chest suddenly on display. “Is there some kind of danger?”

“Yeah.” Sirius closes his eyes and attunes himself to the wards of the house. They’re bouncing and pacing back and forth like beasts in their cages. Something _is_ coming. With a slight motion of his mind, Sirius sweeps the thoughts of Narcissa, Draco, and Harry. They’re starting to wake, Narcissa first, as the one most attuned to the family magic, and the others just behind.

But for the moment at least, they’re all right. That means the threat is coming, not here yet.

“I want you to take Narcissa and Draco and Harry and hide in the safe room in the attic,” Sirius says quietly, opening his eyes and turning his head to look at Remus. He doesn’t know what he looks like, but whatever it is, it makes Remus recoil instead of trying to touch him. “Something is coming.”

“ _Something?_ That’s all you can tell me?”

Sirius snarls at him, but absently, because he’s concentrating on the wards. There’s information radiating from them, but it’s streaming through his head like the clear rays of a star, and all he can grasp is that, yes, _something_ is coming, and it’s dangerous, and if he doesn’t want to—

Sirius snaps his eyes open.

“It’s _him_ , Remus! You-Know-Who!”

Luckily, that’s the only notice Remus needs to turn around and sprint madly out of the room, yelling for Harry and Cissy as he goes. Sirius spends a moment with his head down, shuddering, and then he turns into a dog.

The notifications for the wards are less clear like this, but in some ways, that’s what he wants. He can concentrate on what he needs to concentrate on, namely reaching the outer edge of the gardens and checking on the wards there. And dogs move faster than two legs can carry him right now.

He rushes out of his room and sees Harry standing there with one hand clasped to his forehead. Blood is pulsing between his fingers. Padfoot growls at the scent, and then turns and points his nose firmly in the direction of the safe room. _He’ll_ feel safer, too, knowing that Harry is there, behind the strongest wards in the house.

“No, I have to be with you, Sirius. You don’t know what he’s capable of—the Speakers have been training me—”

Sirius locks his teeth and growls. Harry stares at him with wide, astonished eyes. And then Remus comes up and takes Harry’s arm and begins speaking to him in soothing tones, and Sirius just hopes that that means Harry is going to _listen._ He bounds down the last set of stairs and runs frantically towards the gardens.

Before he can get to the door that leads out onto them, it blows inwards.

And the thickest, darkest magic Sirius has ever felt begins to pour in.

*

“If I hear that you have come out during the battle—”

“I want to _help_ , Mother.”

Narcissa puts a finger beneath her son’s chin and tilts it up. Draco stares back at her, trembling a little, but with his arms crossed and locked on his chest. Narcissa wants to sigh. Of all the times for her Slytherin son to adopt Gryffindor bravery…

“I know that you do,” she says, and forces her voice to gentle when she sees the way Draco is stubbornly narrowing his eyes at her. “But you cannot.”

“I can, too!”

“No,” Narcissa says, and at least he flinches a little. It doesn’t feel good, making her son flinch, but right now, that’s the only indication she has that he’s _listening_. “You don’t know the right kind of magic, Draco. There is only one kind of power that can stand against the Dark Lord now, and you do not know how to wield it.”

“I’ve been reading up on Dark Arts!”

Narcissa shakes her head. “I did not mean that. It is a magic peculiar to the Blacks alone, and you do not carry the name.” She hopes, for a fleeting moment, that Sirius won’t let his stupid principles or his even stupider pride get in the way of using that magic if he needs to.

She hopes he _can_. She was never privy to the lessons that her aunt and uncle taught Sirius and Regulus when they were younger, and she only knows for sure that she and Andromeda learned to wield it. Bellatrix was too mad, even then.

But if Sirius cannot, then Narcissa is there. And she will walk to her death in the middle of the night before she will allow her son to come to harm.

Draco is opening his mouth to make some other silly argument when Narcissa says, her voice deliberately cold and uninterested, “If you come out during the battle, I will cease all of my efforts to try and help you get Malfoy Manor back.”

Draco’s eyes are wide, and he looks far more betrayed than he would have if she had slapped him, Narcissa knows. She sighs and kisses his cheek, and then nods to the door of the safe room, where Lupin and Harry have already gone. “Get into that room, Draco.”

“Yes, Mother,” he whispers, bowing his head.

Narcissa’s heart freezes a little as she sees him duck behind the wards, which shine as coruscating wheels of golden-green light. She hopes that he will forgive her and think about it later—think about how serious she is to have made a threat like that.

The door of the safe room begins to swing shut. Once it’s closed, it will blend with the wall of the house, and no one but Sirius will be able to find his way to it, unless someone opens it from the inside. Even Narcissa’s memory of exactly where the door stands will be obliterated when it is shut.

And then someone sprints out from behind it, just as the door swings the rest of the way shut and keeps Lupin and the children inside.

The _child._ Narcissa stares down at Harry Potter, his forehead bleeding and his eyes wide and his face pale and green serpents coiled around his neck.

“You will weaken the defense,” she whispers, ready to call out to Lupin and get him to open the door again so that Harry can go back inside. “Sirius will be paying attention to you instead of fighting—”

Potter lifts something that glints on his hand, so brilliant that Narcissa has to shield her eyes. But she is well-aware that it has the brutal red glitter of fire.

“Chaos left me this,” Potter whispers. “And Chaos burned him, burned one of his wands, although it couldn’t be the real one because I know that he’s using another one.” He swallows. “It’s the best weapon we have to use against him.”

Narcissa is about to argue, to say that Sirius’s Black magic is the best tool they have against it, but then they hear a scream from downstairs. Narcissa knows it is in her cousin’s voice.

They have no time.

Potter leads the charge down the stairs, his winged snake flying ahead of him, and Narcissa follows, not wasting her breath on curses.

*

Sirius knows within the first moments of the clash that he’s going to lose.

Voldemort is by himself, other than a couple cloaked figures standing on the edge of the gardens that seem to be trying to tear down the last of the wards. Voldemort is so powerful that he simply tore a hole in the wards, a jagged place in the back of Sirius’s mind that is bleeding and burning and trying to get his attention. Sirius wishes he could blame that for being bowled over from his feet the minute Voldemort’s magic touches him.

But it’s not that, even as Voldemort’s first spell slides off him—he didn’t expect a dog—and Sirius rolls back to his feet and transforms into a human. The towering wall of magic that soars towards the sky, blue-black and shining like a wave about to fall, is the thing that is going to make all the difference.

Sirius swallows, and grips his wand. He knows that he can’t win against a wave like that.

But he’s going to try anyway. For Harry.

Especially because the next second Harry and Narcissa come running out of the house, and Harry yells something at Voldemort in Parseltongue that makes him shriek in rage and whirl around to the attack.

Sirius yells at Harry, “Go back inside!”, but he doesn’t think his godson is even paying attention. Narcissa runs up to Harry and grips his arm, but two of the green serpents riding his shoulders turn around and bare their fangs, and Narcissa falls back, her face filled with shock.

The Parseltongue hisses fly back and forth for a thick second, long enough for Narcissa to step back to Sirius’s side and say, “You know what you have to use.”

“No, I don’t!”

Voldemort flings his wand up and sends a streak of lightning at Harry. Harry _blocks it_ with a complicated motion of his hands in the air that might, if someone thought about it, resemble a serpent sliding along the ground. Voldemort pauses for a second as if astonished himself, and then laughs and returns to the attack.

“The Black power,” Narcissa murmurs, her voice close to Sirius’s ear. “The Black magic.”

“The wards didn’t stop him!”

“That is not what I’m talking about,” Narcissa says, and her hand closes down hard on his arm as Harry dodges a dark red curse and then his winged snake tries to get around Voldemort. Voldemort aims his wand at the little thing, but it turns and flies back to Harry’s shoulder before he can get a straight line at it. “Your parents did not train you in the art of the darkness?”

Sirius freezes. Of course they did. He knew how to do it before he went to Hogwarts.

But he literally hasn’t thought of it in years. He couldn’t use it in Azkaban, since it would have had no effect on the Dementors. And just the thought of using it here, where he might not be able to control it and _Harry_ is nearby, is enough to break him into shivers of terror.

This time, Voldemort flings a curse that Harry can’t block, although he lifts a fiery shield that seems to muffle the impact. But Harry flies backwards and collides with the side of the house, a bruise blossoming across his temple and his neck hanging limply for a second, and Sirius’s resolve hardens.

“Yeah,” he says, and runs forwards. He has to be close to Voldemort. He can’t chance not being.

And the air around his hands begins to twist and darken.

*

“ _Get up, get up! We can’t let him win!_ ”

The soft, urgent hisses of Lion in his ears seem to come from another world. Harry braces himself against the bulk of Grimmauld Place and shakes his head, but that doesn’t stop the ringing. He really hit _hard_ when the curse broke through his shield. Chaos’s firestone didn’t prove so effective after all.

And Voldemort is stalking towards him now, his teeth bared like stumps in his mouth and his red eyes full of sickening humor.

“ _You thought to strike down_ me _with Parseltongue? The wizard who is the last of the Slytherin line, who has studied it more than anyone else_?”

Harry finally gets his feet underneath him, thank Merlin. He staggers up and glares, and pauses when he notices the speculative look Voldemort is giving him. Well, it doesn’t matter. _Nothing_ matters but surviving the next few moments, and the ones after that, and the ones after that. And doing something to make sure Voldemort can’t harm Sirius and the other people here with him.

Harry cares more about that than he does about anything else. He meant what he told Lyassa, that he doesn’t think he’ll survive the war.

But he does hope he doesn’t die here, when he hasn’t done a lot of damage to Voldemort.

He licks his lips and hisses back, “ _Did you know that the other Parselmouths think you’re corrupt and a stupid example of our kind_?”

Voldemort jerks to a halt as though Harry has slammed another shield up in front of him. He stares at Harry with narrowed eyes, then sneers and says, “ _There are no other Parlsemouths._ ”

“ _Then where do you think I learned the magic I used against you? Do you think I’m enough of a genius to figure it out on my own_?”

Voldemort sneers, but it’s half-hearted. Harry’s intrigued him. Good. He wants to know more about the other Parselmouths.

Now if only Harry had a plan beyond “survive the next few seconds,” everything would be perfect.

He holds Voldemort’s gaze and reminds himself that “survive the next few seconds” is the foundation of everything that comes after. He clenches his hands in front of him and adds, “ _They’re really upset with you. They helped me mainly because they hate you._ ”

An enraged hiss answers him, and then Voldemort says, “ _I have had enough of your cheek,_ ” and adds, in English or Latin or whatever else you want to consider it, “ _Crucio_!”

Harry flings himself to the ground, and manages to get under the line of yellow light that strikes towards him. But he knows, as he rolls back to his feet, that he won’t manage to dodge for much longer. His head is still ringing, all his muscles ache, he’s afraid for Lion and his conjured snakes, and his magic just isn’t as _strong_ as Voldemort’s. That’s all there is to it.

Then someone comes charging in from the side. Harry only has the chance to see that it’s Sirius before his godfather springs on Voldemort and clasps him with hands that look like they have spinning blades of darkness around them.

Voldemort goes down in a heap from the charge, but he’s back on his feet in seconds, and Sirius _screams_ as Voldemort lashes him with some curse. Harry can see his godfather’s blood on the ground, and he—

He goes a little mad.

“ _I’m the one you want to kill, not him_!” he shrieks, sprinting forwards. Lion is flying behind him, and the green snakes have fallen off somewhere. Harry doesn’t care. He wants to stop Voldemort from killing Sirius more than he’s ever wanted anything, even his next breath. “ _Come on and face me, you coward_!”

Voldemort’s lips part in something that only looks like a smile because he’s doing it with his mouth. “ _Since I believe that it will hurt you worse than anything else,_ ” he hisses back, “ _of course I will do this._ ”

He draws his wand back—

And then, incredibly, overwhelmingly, _he_ is the one who screams in pain.

*

Sirius doesn’t know what kind of curse Voldemort hit him with, but it’s some cousin to the Cruciatus. And yes, it sends endless pain ricocheting through his body, and he knows that he won’t be able to stand any time soon.

But his parents tortured him like that when he was a child. Him and Reggie. Merlin, he hasn’t thought of Reggie in years, and now he seems to be thinking of him all the time, or at least since he brought up the wards around the house.

The curse doesn’t cripple him. Sirius raises his hands, and the Black magic, the power they took their name from, coalesces around his hands and spreads further away. It’s slow. It’s been years since he bothered to remember the training.

But some things, like his name, have remained with him through the years in Azkaban and the Dementors. And he would do anything to save Harry, including taking up magic Darker than this.

The Blacks are named after stars. But they took their _surname_ from the darkness between those stars.

And that’s what Sirius unleashes on the monster hissing at Harry. The cold of the absolute void, the darkness without light.

The cold seizes Voldemort, and he doesn’t move, perhaps _can’t_ move. Sirius feels a tingle of it himself, but it doesn’t harm him, this magic has never harmed the Blacks, and he clamps his hands on Voldemort’s arms.

It only takes a few seconds of holding him, while Voldemort struggles, screaming, and as much as Sirius’s flesh revolts at the notion that he’s touching skin at least partially taken from his godson—

It’s worth it, to watch both of Voldemort’s eyes burst and his skin flash-freeze and fall away from him in large black flakes.

He’s screaming, hissing, tossing his head back and baring teeth that look like stumps covered in oil. That isn’t smart, because Sirius can take advantage of it and he _does_ , thrusting his hand into Voldemort’s mouth and straight down his throat. And then he no longer has a voice. Sirius chuckles despite himself at the thought of what the void must be doing to his vocal cords.

Voldemort staggers away from him, and Sirius sighs. It was probably too optimistic to hope that he’d _kill_ the monster, especially since he survived being a wraith and possessing people or animals for thirteen years. But he’s won for the moment, and that’s all he wants. As Voldemort Apparates out through the hole he already tore in the wards, Sirius turns and faces the two Death Eaters who are still working on tearing through the wards themselves.

They’re motionless with shock, and they don’t move fast enough.

Harry crashes into him and clings to him, shaking like Sirius used to after a session with his mother. Sirius clasps him close, so that Harry won’t look up and have to see what he does next, and brings the wards _down_ and _across._

The Death Eaters fall into two meaty halves. Each.

Sirius bows his head and holds Harry harder, dismissing the magic from his hands with a quiet effort of will. It didn’t hurt Harry, of course, since Sirius didn’t will it to and he had better control than he remembered, but he doesn’t want to forget about it and hurt someone accidentally.

All his kills, from now on, are going to be on purpose.


	10. Bright Star

“If you would repeat what you did for our records, sir?”

The Auror facing Sirius now is one of the stolid sort who aren’t going to be thrown off-stride by someone who doesn’t want to talk to them, or short, clipped answers. Sirius would know, because he already tried both.

At least he did manage to detach Harry from him and get him sent to bed. Harry tried to linger on the stairs, looking back at Sirius, but Narcissa swept him up and on. Sirius has the feeling that she’s going to keep a close eye on Harry for a while, after he managed to sneak past her when the safe room door was closing.

Sirius closes his eyes and massages his forehead, not caring if the Aurors see how tired he is. That they’re more interested in finding out how he hurt Voldemort and killed the Death Eaters—who turned out to be a Yaxley and a Macnair—is absolutely typical of the Ministry. Harry already hates them. Sirius might as well join his godson in letting his disgust and contempt loose.

“The wards alerted me to the approach of an enemy,” Sirius drones, staring over the Auror’s shoulder at the far side of the kitchen. “I did my best to send my godson and my young cousin, Draco Malfoy, into the safe room with Remus Lupin, my friend who lives here. Harry managed to escape and run downstairs. Voldemort is targeting him, as you probably know—”

“I know what the boy _claims_ ,” cuts in the other Auror, a young, dark-haired woman who hasn’t spoken much. “But it’s simply not possible that You-Know-Who was here and no one died.”

“Fine,” Sirius says, rolling his eyes, and ignoring the way she stiffens in outrage. “The _Dark Lord impostor_ who showed up dueled Harry. I think he would have killed him if I wasn’t there. He certainly launched the Cruciatus Curse at him once. I used Black family magic to attack Voldemort, and—”

“What kind of Black family magic, sir?” That’s the Auror who does most of the talking, the tall, stolid man.

“A spell that my ancestors perfected,” Sirius says, with a small shrug. “It’s one that can pierce almost all the shields someone can raise around themselves.”

“What’s the incantation?” The Auror’s quill hovers above the parchment he’s been taking notes on.

“Why should I tell you that, when I would see it show up among the Death Eaters to be used against me and my godson in a few months?” In truth, Sirius isn’t worried about that. It takes years to learn how to master the cold of the void without it eating you, and it also isn’t common that someone can do it without training _early_ in life. But it makes a convenient excuse not to further detail it.

The Auror’s nostrils flare. “Sir. The Ministry is not subject to cooperation with the enemy of that kind—”

“Really?” Sirius begins to tick off the lies inherent in that statement on his fingers. “I was put in Azkaban for twelve years without a trial. You let Dumbledore slip through your fingers. You’ve lost a bunch of Death Eaters in a prison breakout. You—”

“None of that means You-Know-Who has returned,” the younger Auror interjects.

“Of course not.” Sirius drops his hand and smiles blandly at her. “It only explains why I’m so reluctant to give you information about the spell that I used to defeat the person who _looks like him._ ”

“It could be important information to allow others to survive battles with him and his forces.”

Sirius meets the man’s eyes with a thin smile. “Why, if he’s only someone impersonating Voldemort and not the real thing? He isn’t going to be that intimidating or that powerful.”

They go around in circles with him for a while more, but Sirius refuses to surrender any specific information. He doesn’t trust the Ministry. He only called the Aurors in the first place because he wanted them to see the remains of the two Death Eaters and confirm that they really had been killed by the Black wards.

They might or might not publicize that information. Frankly, Sirius doesn’t care. He knows that it’ll make its way to the people who need to know it, namely other Death Eaters and Voldemort sympathizers in the Ministry.

The more wary people are of attacking him and his godson, the better, as far as Sirius is concerned.

The Aurors finally leave, and Sirius closes his eyes. Then he stands. He needs to make sure Harry’s asleep, and then he plans to collapse himself.

Remus falls into step beside him as he leaves the dining room. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Sirius blinks at him. “What for?” His mind is already spinning, trying to find some way to connect Remus’s apology to what happened, but he can’t.

“I should have kept Harry in the safe room. I don’t know why he managed to slip past me so fast—”

Sirius snorts and shakes his head. “Narcissa was outside the room and should have been able to keep him out of the battle, but she didn’t, either. I don’t like what happened, but it wasn’t your fault, Remus.”

A year ago, Remus might have been able to bull through what Sirius was saying and ignore it. Now he pauses and lets his nostrils flare a bit, presumably sniffing for some sign of increased sweat or other telltales of a lie. Sirius just smiles tiredly at him and keeps climbing the stairs.

“You do mean that,” Remus says, tilting his head a little. “Then who do you blame for Harry being on the battlefield?”

“Harry.”

Remus laughs, but Sirius just shakes his head a little as he goes up and taps on the door of Harry’s bedroom. Harry makes a muffled noise that sounds like permission, and Sirius goes in and sits on the bed.

Harry is pale and shaken. However, he also has a dazed look about his eyes that Sirius knows means Narcissa has fed him a potion to deal with lingering pain and send him to sleep, so Sirius won’t stay long.

“Please don’t do that again,” Sirius says, quietly but forcefully. “If I wanted you on the battlefield, then I would have told you that. If I ask you to stay in the safe room, then you should do that instead.”

Harry worries his lip between his teeth, and Sirius has to blink harshly. He looks exactly like Lily at the moment, who would do that kind of thing before they took an exam or she had to make a hard decision. Sirius wonders if Snape has seen that particular gesture, and what memories it brought back to him.

“I had to save you,” Harry whispers, sounding on the verge of brokenhearted. “Would you have called on that cold magic if I wasn’t on the battlefield?”

“Probably not,” Sirius admits. “But, Harry, it’s not your _responsibility_ to save me. That’s the way that godfathers and godsons work. I’m supposed to protect you, not the other way around. And I’ve already done a poor job of that in the past. Please let me do a better job in the future.”

“The way the Dursleys treated me wasn’t your fault.”

Harry’s voice is slurring, and Sirius knows that he’ll be asleep in just a few minutes. He grabs his godson’s hand and squeezes it, hard enough to make Harry look at him again. Sirius says fiercely, softly, “But the way I ran after Pettigrew _was_. And the way I injured you after we’d barely started to get to know each other again. Let me make up for that.”

“Okay?” Harry yawns, and then he falls asleep sitting up. Sirius eases him gently down on the bed and strokes his forehead, shivering as his hand passes over the scar and he feels something cold stir behind it.

Harry may argue in the morning that he can’t be held to the promise he’s made, given that he was more than halfway into dreamland at the time, but Sirius intends to try. He’s not willing to suffer again what he did this evening when he saw Harry being hurled into the wall by Voldemort’s spells

*

“The first thing you need to know is that Harry is perfectly fine.”

That Narcissa chooses to lead with that as she steps through the Floo does not reassure Severus. He turns to face her, glad that he is by habit an early riser and none of the other children staying with him at the moment is up.

“What does that mean?”

Narcissa pauses in the face of his anger, and sighs. “There was an attack last night at Sirius’s home, by the Dark Lord and two of his Death Eaters. The Death Eaters are both dead, and the Dark Lord fled.”

“And you did not come to tell me the moment it was finished?”

“We were all exhausted,” Narcissa says, and her tone is a knife that Severus would have been wary of feeling against his throat at any other time. But this time, he can only feel the rage swelling inside him, with fear not far behind. “Sirius used the wards to cut the Death Eaters apart, and a magic unique to the Black family to make the Dark Lord leave. Harry, meanwhile, had been dueling the Dark Lord—”

“How badly is he wounded?”

“All his wounds have been taken care of, along with the exhaustion, physical and magical.” Narcissa looks him square in the eye. “Blame me and Harry, if you must blame someone. Sirius tried to insist that Harry stay in safe room at Grimmauld Place with Remus and Draco. But he slipped past the door, and past me, and I did not take extraordinary measures to ensure that Harry stayed in the house.”

Severus closes his eyes. Harry is fine. Or, at least, he is alive and not wounded. The definition of “fine” might need some work once Severus gets hold of him.

“Harry’s hurt?”

Mr. Nott has come into the kitchen now, because of course he has. Narcissa only nods to him and says, “Not now. He was somewhat hurt in a fight with the Dark Lord that took place on the grounds of Mr. Black’s house.”

“I want to see him.”

“Mr. Black might not want you over there right now.” Narcissa’s remoteness is a match for the glacial fire burning in Nott’s eyes. “He’s still asleep, and Harry is barely awake himself.”

“I’d still like to see him.”

Nott’s tone makes it sound like he’s about to charge past Narcissa and through the Floo. Narcissa glances at Severus, making it clear that she thinks _he_ should play a part in disciplining young Slytherins. Severus restrains his tongue with an effort, and reaches out to touch Mr. Nott’s shoulder, making the movement large and obvious.

“You will help most if you will go and fetch some of the potions that Mr. Potter might need from my lab, Mr. Nott. I trust you to find the ones that will help with exhaustion and pain.”

Nott pauses for a long moment, narrowing his eyes, as if to say that he knows Severus is trying to get rid of him. In the end, he nods and goes into the lab, letting the door fall shut behind him with a pointed thump.

Severus glances at Narcissa. “I will wait for a fuller account in Harry’s own words before I attempt to discipline anyone.”

“You should.” Narcissa hasn’t yielded the knife-edge to her tone at all. “It was an act of impulse, but in the end, he held his own until Sirius could reach him. And Sirius’s unique use of Black magic saved him.”

Narcissa sounds smug, but Severus couldn’t care less about the magic Black chose, even if it did send the Dark Lord running. He cares about Harry, who was on a battlefield he was too young for, which might have caused him more trauma with memories of the last time he faced the Dark Lord and his dragon died.

Black can do whatever he wants, but if he proves an insufficient guardian for Harry, then Severus will remove Harry from his custody, no matter what difficulties it creates.

*

“It wasn’t Sirius’s fault. He _told_ me to stay in the safe room. I’m the one who ran out and joined the battle.”

Harry doesn’t know how many more times he can say those words without sounding petulant about it. But they’re _true._ Severus, stony-eyed in the chair next to Harry’s bed, wants to find some way to blame Sirius somehow, but Harry isn’t going to let him. He should be the one who gets all the blame.

If Severus even has to blame someone at all. They all survived, and Sirius exploded Voldemort’s _eyes._ Why isn’t that something to celebrate?

“What injuries did you sustain in the fight?”

“Only the ones I told you about,” Harry says. “I’m telling the truth,” he adds, when Severus just stares at him. “Voldemort flung me into a wall, and we traded curses, but I blocked almost all of them. He tried to use the Cruciatus on me, but I dodged it.”

“Then why do you still look pale?”

“Because I used a _lot_ of magic last night,” Harry says. “In a very short time. And he woke everyone up in the middle of the night, the inconsiderate git, so it’s not like I got to sleep straight through.”

He hopes that will make Severus laugh, but Severus just considers him again, and then nods, in a critical way that makes Harry think that Severus is relying more on the evidence of his eyes as he looks at Harry, not Harry’s words. He pulls a flask of some thick, milky potion out of his robe pocket.

“What’s that?” Harry grimaces at the whiny tone of his own voice, and shakes his head a little. But he _hates_ the thick potions, that ones that taste like chalk going down. “I promise, I’m fine.”

“Your hands trembled while you were talking,” Severus says crisply. “I think the Cruciatus affected you more than you’ve told me. Are you sure that you completely dodged it?”

“It only brushed my shoulder.” Harry sighs and reaches out for the potion when he gets a long _look_. “But I didn’t even really feel it. I thought I dodged it completely because I should have felt _something_ if it affected me, right?”

“No,” Severus says simply. “Not necessarily. You might have ignored the effects in the midst of battle and been unable to distinguish between it and other pains that you suffered later. Or it might have affected you with one of its symptoms, namely the tremors, without causing the pain. You still need a potion that can help you fight the aftereffects.”

“I didn’t know there was a potion like that. If there is, why are there people in St. Mungo’s with the aftereffects of Cruciatus damage?”

“They are the ones who have been under the curse too long and cannot be saved. This potion is specifically for those barely touched by the curse. And you are putting it off drinking it.”

Harry holds his nose and tosses the potion down his throat, while Lion hisses softly on his shoulder and offers to bite Severus for him. Harry strokes his snake to calm him down, then sighs and hands the flask back to Severus. He can feel the potion moving through him, thick and cold and making his stomach squirm as if he’s going to heave it up at any second, and Harry swallows queasily.

Severus stows the flask in some pouch or pocket, and then he reaches out and clutches Harry tightly.

Harry feels his eyes open wide. He hugs Severus back, but uncertainty. It feels as though he he’s gone from a scalding pot to a warm lake. Why did Severus scold him that way and give him the potion and everything, and then act as if he wants to hug the life out of Harry?

“When Narcissa told me that you had faced Voldemort in battle,” Severus whispers, “there was no—I could not _grasp_ it. That you had done that, and that you were alive and well.” He draws back, and Harry ends up averting his eyes from what he can see in Severus’s face.

“I know, with your personality, that other, similar things will happen,” Severus says. “That you will face him again. But I will ask that you consider how we feel when you do. And that if you went into battle because you feared to lose Black, you remember that we feel the same way about _you_.”

 _He didn’t even choke talking about Sirius feeling the same way as him,_ Harry thinks dazedly, blinking at Severus. He can’t blame the haze in his head on the potions Mrs. Malfoy fed him last night, even though he wants to. It’s the devastation he can see lurking on the edges of Severus’s expression, waiting to come out.

It _would_ come out if Harry died. Harry knows that now.

He leans forwards and hugs Severus once more, to try and get rid of it. It also helps to let him duck his head and get his face out of sight, because he doesn’t want Severus to see what his emotions are doing.

From the way Severus’s arms return the embrace, he probably knows anyway.

Then Harry pulls back with a sigh. “Theo is probably wearing a hole in the carpet with the way he must be pacing outside,” he says.

“Indeed.” Severus draws back. “It is not only your guardians who worry, Harry.”

It seems that he’s not going to be permitted to ignore this after all. Harry nods. “I know. I’ll try.”

Severus nods back. “Good.”


	11. Building

“What do you think, Hermione?”

“I think it might look too prosperous.” Hermione glances critically around the inside of the flat her parents have shown her. “I mean, the building from the outside. A lot of the Death Eaters and so on are rich. They’re probably more likely to think that we’re hiding in a place they would consider luxurious than one that isn’t.”

“I am not renting a tumble-down place so that you can hide better,” Mum says flatly. “What if you get hit by a falling brick?”

Hermione opens her mouth to argue that that’s less likely to happen to her than getting cursed, and then thinks better of it. Besides, her father is speaking now. “What about illusions?”

“You mean, weaving them around the building?” Hermione smiles at her father as her mind catches up with what she’s pretty sure he’s thinking. “So that it looks like a ruin to Death Eaters?”

“Only if we can do it so that it doesn’t look that way to Muggles,” Mum says. “We don’t have enough money to buy the building, Hermione.”

Hermione smiles wider. “Of course not. And I don’t want to put the people who live here in danger, anyway. It would be better to Apparate somewhere else and walk here, or even Apparate right into the flat.”

“I thought there were spells preventing that.”

“Only in places like Hogwarts where witches and wizards have been there a long time,” Hermione murmurs, thinking about it. Do they want spells that will prevent Apparition in, or Apparition out? She can see disadvantages both ways; they can’t access it immediately themselves if the spells prevent Apparition in, but leaving those off means that then they’re vulnerable to their enemies if the Death Eaters ever learn the Apparition coordinates. On the other hand, lifting spells to prevent Apparition out could prevent them from escaping if they ever need to.

Well, she has people to discuss this with, and figure out if it’s even possible to weave illusions around the building that the Muggles won’t see.

Her mother squeezes her shoulder and guides her into the open room of the flat. “Then let’s look it over and find out if it’s going to work for you.”

Hermione leans against her mum a little as they walk. It’s wonderful to know that at least _some_ parts of the wizarding world are no longer a secret from her family.

*

“I must admit, I came mostly out of curiosity. I can’t believe what you’re saying, but I also don’t know what you would have to gain from propagating a lie.”

Minerva smiles thinly at Augusta and settles back into the chair behind her desk. “Why would you have a hard time believing it? Did you imagine that Voldemort came into being fully-formed and with no _mortal_ name?”

Augusta sniffs and accepts the cup of tea that Minerva hands her. “I did not believe that he was a half-blood. A bastard pureblood, perhaps. Someone abused by Muggles as a child.”

“And his Parseltongue?”

“That was one reason I thought he had to be a pureblood.”

She’s not going to ruffle Augusta, Minerva can see that, so she lets it go and moves on. “In reality, he is the descendant of a pureblood family that speaks Parseltongue, the Gaunts. They’re gone or dead now. But his father was a Muggle from the same village where the Gaunts lived. Riddle’s mother seduced him.”

Minerva thinks that a love potion might have been involved, actually. But Phineas Nigellus Black admitted that was only a guess on his part, and not something he actually knew.

“Hmmm. That is something provable.” Augusta stares at her over the teacup. “Or disprovable.”

“We have the words of portraits who knew him on it—”

“Which portraits?”

Minerva feels a light stab of annoyance. She’s not sure if Augusta wants to believe that Voldemort is an immortal monster, or is being combative for no reason. “Phineas Nigellus Black, for one. And Armando Dippet, who was Headmaster when Riddle was here as a student.”

“Why is his name Riddle instead of Gaunt?”

“His Muggle father’s name. Apparently his mother was enough in love with his father to want him to carry it.”

Augusta take a different tack. “And you’ll trust the word of Phineas Black, the most hated Headmaster the school ever had, and Armando Dippet, the weakest one? You’ll need more than that to convince me, Minerva.”

Minerva sighs. She hoped it wouldn’t come to this, and Augusta would trust what they had. She doesn’t like to admit what she did to get the memory she has as proof. But she bends down and retrieves the Pensieve that Albus once used from the cabinet behind her. “All right. Here is a memory I took from an Azkaban guard who kept one of the last Gaunts in prison.”

“How did you know to go and get it?”

“Because of the information I had from the Headmasters’ portraits.”

Augusta frowns, as if she wants to find a reason to object to that, and finally settles back with a sigh and a shake of her head. “Fine. I’ll watch it. But I have to tell you, Minerva, that very little of this seems substantial. And you’ll need more than this to make people believe that You-Know-Who was _mortal_ once.”

 _So that is it. She’s reluctant to think that someone whose minions destroyed part of her family is mortal. Maybe she thinks that I’ll expect her to sympathize with him._ Minerva looks Augusta right in the eye and says quietly, “The more we can keep it in mind, the easier it will be to defeat him.”

There’s a long pause. Then Augusta nods, and waits for Minerva to place the memory in the Pensieve before she leans over it.

It’s a beginning. Not as much of one as Minerva wanted, but she’ll take it.

*

“Can you describe the process of the Black magic to me again? It sounds fascinating.”

Sirius hides a grimace with difficulty. He knows very well that he doesn’t need to worry about Adele Greengrass being able to perform the Blacks’ secret magic if he describes it to her; it will still take training and the kind of study that would rule Greengrass’s life for a decade.

He’s wary, instead, of the gleam in her eyes as she leans forwards from her chair across the room. Of the way she turns her head to the side to draw attention to the arch of her neck.

At least one of his allies wants to court him for his power, and Sirius has no idea what he should be doing with this.

Remus steps into the drawing room and studies them for a second before his eyebrows go up. Sirius looks pitifully at his best friend, hoping for a rescue, but Remus only gives him a devilish grin before he says, “How is your tea, Miss Greengrass? Did you need anything else? Scones, maybe?”

Greengrass blinks at him and then says, “Oh. No. Thank you.”

“Well, I hope that you won’t be chased away by Sirius’s lack of hospitality,” Remus goes on in a false hearty tone. “He takes after his mother, you know, always hiding all the food. If you get hungry, just ask, and remind him that he should take more after his father instead. That was a man who always had a lavish tea.”

 _I hate you,_ Sirius mouths to Remus over Greengrass’s head.

Remus winks at him and ducks out of the room. Sirius sighs. Greengrass focuses back on him, and mercifully changes the subject. “I received a message from Hecuba Selwyn the other day asking what actions we’re going to take in reaction to the Ministry’s continuing assault on your godson.”

Sirius clenches his hand into a fist down near the side of the chair, but forces himself to keep his expression bland. “Too many overt actions right now would make it seem as if we’re desperate to deny their accusations, which means that more people are likely to think we’re lying. Instead, we’ll proceed with having Harry tell the truth calmly and—and maybe offer his Pensieve memories of the night he confronted Voldemort to the people who would like to see them.”

That’s something Sirius is opposed to unless it’s absolutely necessary, but he already knows that Harry thinks it will become necessary. He offered to do it with a mask over his face like hard iron.

Sirius knows, because he watched a lot of curses demonstrated during his childhood, exactly how brittle iron is.

“He would let someone see an encounter with Voldemort that private?”

At least Greengrass’s voice is hushed in a way that makes it clear she understands the seriousness of the situation. And she can call Voldemort by his proper name. That’s interesting, since she often flinches when Sirius says it.

Sirius holds her eyes and nods. “He would do whatever he has to do to fight this war. And I would do whatever is necessary to protect my godson.”

Greengrass seems to understand the implicit threat in the words, which makes Sirius think better of her intelligence, the way her saying Voldemort’s name made him think better of her courage. She sits back and picks up her teacup, sipping delicately from it. When she puts it down again, she’s all business.

“Do you think it would help if we showed the memory of your defenses injuring Voldemort? That might win some of the people who are wavering to our side. Right now, many of them think they’ll have no choice but to join the Death Eaters, whatever the cost in money and lives and power, because there’s no way to resist _him_. Seeing that someone can fight Voldemort, and that man the guardian of the Boy-Who-Lived, might sway some of them.”

Sirius blinks. Yes, she can come up with good ideas when she resists the ridiculous urge to flirt with him, too. “I’d be willing to show it, but I don’t know if it would have the impact you’re talking about. Since I only drove him away and didn’t kill him permanently, they might think—”

He trails off as he realizes that Greengrass is staring at him with slightly raised eyebrows.

“You did more than anyone but Potter himself has done,” Greengrass says flatly. “Do you know how long it’s been since someone even _injured_ him in battle? And that’s despite him taking the front lines and almost recklessly flinging himself into danger, in some cases, to flaunt his strength and show his followers that he was supposedly invincible.”

“I suppose I didn’t think of it that way,” Sirius mumbles. He didn’t take the field against Voldemort himself in the first war, except once, and then he was far away from the actual knot of power thrumming around Voldemort and Dumbledore. He fought and killed “ordinary” Death Eaters instead.

“This will have a much greater effect than you think it will,” Greengrass says firmly. “I can promise you, we will attract allies to us if we can but show them what we have to offer.”

“And would they be the sort to stay loyal?” Sirius asks quietly. “I won’t expose Harry to danger for any reason.”

Greengrass rolls her eyes a little. She thinks him stupid for his compassion and his loyalty, Sirius knows, but all he needs is the answer to that question. And he thinks it’ll be honest. Greengrass is the sort who won’t want to be embarrassed by weak allies, so she won’t deliberately introduce weakness to their ranks, either.

“They’re the sort who understand oaths and alliances of necessity,” Greengrass says. “But more than that, they’re the sort who understand vengeance. Make it clear what the cost will be if they betray you.” She smiles a little. “And if you show them the magic of the void…”

“All of them will think that I’m waiting to come after them and kill them with it,” Sirius finishes.

“ _No_.” Greengrass pushes hair out of her eyes, looking annoyed. “They would see that you are powerful and can resist someone they thought couldn’t be resisted. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. You did something no one else except Mr. Potter himself has done. You are unique.”

She looks as if she might start flirting with him again for a second, but luckily she holds back. Sirius finds himself nodding. “Then you have my permission to bring a few of them to the house, and we’ll speak.”

“Oh, thank you so much, _gracious_ Mr. Black. You can’t know what this means to me. I can only hope…”

Sirius tunes her out, sipping at his tea and already plotting how far he’s going to allow them into the house. Nowhere near the family rooms, that’s for certain. And he’ll want Narcissa at his side when they get here. She’s a good hostess.

Remus leans into the drawing room to grin at him from the doorway, which Greengrass can’t see because it’s behind her chair. It’s hard, but Sirius manages to control his scowl. _Just you wait,_ he mouths.

 _I look forward to it,_ Remus’s whole face says before he turns and disappears in the other direction, leaving Sirius to listen to Greengrass’s mixture of plotting and insulting him.

*

It’s a stupid thing to worry about, when there are so _many_ better things to worry about, but Theo can’t shake the feeling that there’s a strange scent in the house tonight.

He lies in his bed, his eyes fastened on the door. He knows that Harry is just down the corridor in his own bedroom, and that he isn’t wandering around tonight. For one thing, Black has been firm about Harry staying in bed, and for another, Theo’s senses are starting to sharpen with the Animagus training. He’s pretty sure that he would hear Harry wandering if he did decide to leave his room. Leopards are nighttime predators.

But that scent.

It’s odd and greasy and strange and _familiar._ As if Theo smelled something like it once before, but he can’t remember where.

Of course, Black’s house is full of scents like that, and so is Professor Snape’s. Until his senses started to sharpen, Theo never realized how much information he absorbed about Potions ingredients, leather, shampoo, sweat, and many other things through his nose. And Black smells like dog half the time even when he doesn’t transform often.

But all the same, this scent makes Theo wary. Maybe because he knows that Black has a similarly sharp nose, as an Animagus, and he hasn’t mentioned smelling it, or reassured Theo that it’s not something to be wary of.

Fuck it. He can’t sleep. He’ll get up and go down to the kitchen, and maybe the smell of hot chocolate prepared by Black’s house-elf—who approves of Theo—will soothe him enough to sleep.

Theo slips out of his bedroom and moves down the corridor, wondering idly if his growing Animagus gifts have started to affect his footsteps, too. He _thinks_ he moves more silently, but it’s not like he memorized the sound of how he moved before he began his training, and he hasn’t managed to successfully surprise Harry or Black yet—

There’s a movement ahead of him.

Theo finds himself freezing and drawing back into a shadow, and _those_ instincts are the cat’s, the leopard’s, the night hunter’s. He squints his eyes and stares, and watches as the small shape trundles along the wall towards the bedrooms.

It comes into a patch of moonlight and sits up, twitching its whiskers. Yes, it’s a rodent.

A _rat._

Theo feels his lips drawing back in a feral snarl, and he transforms his left arm before he even thinks about it, growing spots and fur and, more to the point, claws. He springs forwards, claws aiming to capture the rat.

The creature squeaks and dodges left, then right. But it doesn’t retreat, the a way a normal rat would have. It still tries to get past Theo and towards the bedrooms, and he’s sure, now, absolutely sure, that this is Peter Pettigrew, and that he’s come to spy on Harry and Black, maybe even capture Harry if he can.

 _Over his dead body,_ Theo thinks, and lunges again as Pettigrew briefly pauses near a wall.

He doesn’t catch him, but it seems that he’s finally convinced Pettigrew that he won’t give up the chase and it’s not worth persisting when he’ll get captured or killed. He pivots and scrambles towards the stairs and down them. Theo follows immediately, but alas, he’s not as fast as he would be if he knew how to transform into a leopard completely yet, and he ends up near a hole in the wall that Pettigrew squeezes through, panting with rage.

“Nott?”

That’s Lupin’s rumble, behind him. Theo snarls in response without taking his eyes off the rathole that Pettigrew went down. Lupin circles around to his side, and Theo sees his eyes, direct and yellow and threatening.

“I need you to calm down, Nott. If you don’t, you might go into an involuntary transformation, and that would mean—”

“You can’t smell Pettigrew?”

That brings Lupin up short. He starts to speak, frowns, and then takes a deep whiff. In seconds, he’s staring down at the same hole that Theo already is, and his fingers are tightening to the point that Theo wouldn’t be surprised if he breaks his wand.

“How did you know that he was here, when we didn’t?” Lupin’s eyes slide back to Theo.

Theo shrugs. “I’ve been smelling this rotten scent for a while. I don’t know. Maybe he’s been here before and you and Black got used to it. Or maybe I’m paranoid.” He stares at the hole again. “But I know that I’m damn tired of Black leaving weaknesses in the wards, even if sometimes they protect Harry.”

“Sirius is doing his best,” Lupin begins, but then sighs and trails off in the way that means he probably agrees with Theo. “Come on. We’d better speak with them.”

Theo nods, but satisfies himself by sealing the hole shut first. He knows that Pettigrew is probably gone, not cowering on the other side, but it still soothes him to imagine as they go to walk Black and Harry.


	12. Destroying

“I don’t—don’t know how it happened. I thought I’d secured the wards against Peter entering.”

Harry starts to reach out to Sirius from the couch he and Theo are sitting in the drawing room, hating to see him in such pain, but Theo nudges him sharply in the ribs. Harry glares at him. Theo shakes his head.

Theo is probably doing it because he thinks that Sirius doesn’t deserve sympathy, but there’s something to be said about letting him get everything out first. Harry settles back with a sigh, and Sirius goes stumbling on through his confession.

“I was sure I had everything right. The Black wards would prevent everyone except family members and people who were our allies and friends from coming in. But then that happened with Bellatrix, and they weren’t strong enough to withstand Voldemort, and it turned out that I had to revoke the permission for allies and friends _specifically_. My father invited Peter here one summer. That’s why he could enter.” Sirius takes a deep breath and focuses on Harry, his hands shaking slightly. “I’m sorry. I took back the permission. Please don’t tell Snape.”

Harry has been opening his mouth, but he closes it now and looks closely at Sirius. Sirius seems to have more sweat on his forehead than he should. Harry shakes his head a little. “But I have to tell Professor Snape.”

“I’m afraid he would prevent you from coming back to Grimmauld Place—”

“And maybe he should, with the amount of intruders you’ve had.” Theo’s voice is precise and cold. “Stop telling my friend to not tell one of his guardians about something, Black. I would have told Professor Snape myself if Harry did make that absurd promise.”

Harry frowns at Theo. “I thought you liked Sirius better than that. He’s the one tutoring you in your Animagus training.”

“Unlike you,” Theo says, with a single glance at Harry that makes Harry wince from how cutting it is, “I’m capable of thinking people that I associate with are dangerous when they make dangerous mistakes.”

“What do you want to not tell Snape, Nott?”

Theo and Harry both stare at Sirius, this time. He looks grim, but also as if he assumes that Theo is going to agree. Harry finds his voice first. “I already _said_ I was going to tell him, Sirius!”

“And I think you shouldn’t.” Sirius tries to give him a cocky grin, but it dies in the face of Harry’s incredulous stare. He leans back with a sigh against the couch behind him. “Come on, Harry, it isn’t going to change a lot, is it? Whatever Peter was looking for here, he didn’t find it. We’re going to make sure he doesn’t come back. He was more of a danger to Nott than you, given that Nott was the only one who came into contact with him.”

“Harry is going to tell Professor Snape.” Theo’s voice is as distant and cold as Harry thinks Sirius’s void magic must feel.

Sirius glances at him. “It’s not your decision. It’s Harry’s. And I already told you that I was prepared to offer you certain things so that you wouldn’t.”

“It’s Harry’s decision,” Theo agrees. “And mine.”

Sirius shakes his head. “And you don’t care at all about Harry being separated from me? From Lupin?” He pauses, as if he’s struggling against something choking him, and then adds, “You don’t care at all about giving up on your Animagus training?”

“I care more about Harry being safe.”

“Stop talking about me like I’m not here.”

Harry didn’t know his voice would go that deep, and he can’t blame them when they both start and look at him. He holds his breath for a long second, and then exhales and says, “It’s my decision, yeah. And I’m going to tell Severus. But I’m going to tell him in a way that he’ll let me come back to Grimmauld Place.”

Sirius laughs briefly, sounding for a moment the way he did when he was newly-escaped from Azkaban. “There’s no way to do that.”

“Watch me,” Harry retorts, and stands. Theo moves with him at once, smoothly, and Harry doesn’t miss the fact that Theo is stepping so that he shields Harry’s back from anyone who would strike at him there, like Sirius is in a position to do.

Harry turns his head to glare at Theo, good and hard.

Theo only smiles faintly back at him, his gaze clear and proud. Harry doesn’t even want to know why he’s _proud._ They go upstairs to pack.

*

Severus does not know how he’s remembering to breathe. Some part of him turned cold and crystalline the moment he heard Harry’s story about Pettigrew, and nothing can unfreeze it. He sits there with his hands clenching and then opening, and he’s not telling them to do so. It’s involuntary.

“Severus.”

Harry’s voice is calm, and he puts a hand on Severus’s knee as if he thinks that he’s going to have to stop him from springing up and going through the Floo to murder Sirius Black. There is no danger of that. Severus would wait until Harry was firmly asleep, preferably with a potion of some sort in his system.

And he will have to wait until his body calms down.

“Sirius didn’t mean to,” Harry says calmly. “He forgot that his father gave permission for Pettigrew to be there. It was a mistake, not something he did because he was trying to prove I was a Gryffindor or something.”

“Do you think that matters?” Severus whispers. “How much would that comfort me if his _mistake_ meant you died?”

“But I didn’t.” Harry leans back on his stool to survey Severus critically. “Come on, you’re smarter than this,” he adds, so unexpectedly that Severus can only stare at him. “You know that you can’t blame someone for things they didn’t do. Sirius _is_ sorry.” Harry starts to add something else, then shakes his head. “And he’s sorry for exposing me to Pettigrew at all. But he didn’t get near me. He didn’t harm me.”

“Not for lack of trying, or because Black stood in his way.” Severus sits up, trying to look more like an adult and less like someone who might need to be put in the Janus Thickey Ward. “From what you told me, young Mr. Nott is the one who interfered.”

“Does that matter, as long as _someone_ stood in the way?” Harry gives him a long, calm look. “Sirius is going to put the same wards on the house that you’ll put up, the ones that respond to rats specifically.”

“How did you know that I was going to put those up?” Severus demands. It’s an inane question, which he knows the minute he asks it. But it’s also true that he said nothing about that. He hasn’t said much since they began this conversation, honestly.

“It’s the natural next step, and unless they’re up, then you can’t be sure the house is much safer than Grimmauld Place.” Harry raises an eyebrow at him. “And because you and Sirius have this weird competitive streak over keeping me safe…”

“This is the second time in less than a week that you’ve been in danger at his house!”

Harry sighs and nods. “Yes. And it’s not going to happen again.”

“Unless he discovers another hole in the wards. Which he’s probably going to, at this rate.” Severus closes his eyes and tries desperately to get himself under control. At least his hands have stopped trembling.

“Sirius wants to go through the wards thoroughly and make sure no more weaknesses exist that our enemies could use. That’s one of the reasons that he’s agreed I’ll stay here for a week and won’t come to his house for a while…”

“He _agreed,_ did he? How gracious.”

“Listen,” Harry says, and he sounds weary enough that Severus opens his eyes and focuses on his ward. Harry is giving him an unimpressed glance. “He made a mistake. So did you, before I was Sorted into Slytherin, and even afterwards. I’m not interested in holding either of you responsible for them to the point of screaming at you. So could you stop sounding as though you think Sirius did this on purpose?”

Severus wrestles his emotions back under control, although mostly because he knows he’s contributing to Harry’s distress if he doesn’t. In the end, he nods.

And at least Harry will be home for a week and safe from whatever stupid plan Black thinks up next. It won’t prevent Severus from screaming at him through the Floo, but he doesn’t need to make the mutt sorry he exists.

“Good.” Harry stands up and comes over to hug Severus, briefly enough that he’s just sitting there in surprise by the time Harry moves back again. “And you should probably talk to Theo before he explodes.”

“Because of what?” Severus works his tongue and teeth around the words, managing to force out the ones he wants. It takes far more effort than it should, but that’s not something that he intends to reveal to anyone.

“Because Sirius tried to bribe him not to tell you, and Theo doesn’t think I should be anywhere near Sirius or Grimmauld Place.” Harry rolls his eyes slightly. “I don’t know if it’s the effect of that spell you worked to link our dreams together or what, but he’s really bloody protective.”

Harry has walked to the far side of the room before Severus can get his mind back on track. “You timed that revelation on purpose,” he says, and Harry stops, but doesn’t turn around to look at him for a second. “You told me about Black doing that only after you’d—hugged me.”

He mutters the last words like a child, something he’s not proud of, but the look Harry tosses him over his shoulder is childish, too. But at least a sparkling, mischievous kind of childishness, which is something he’s seen so rarely on Harry’s face that he’s stunned into silence again.

“After two years in Slytherin, I suppose that I’ve learned _something_ ,” Harry says, and winks, and departs with a swagger to his walk that Severus can’t bring himself to regret.

*

“ _Concentrate on the image of the snake that we talked about._ ”

Harry nods and doesn’t open his eyes. He’ll have to learn how to do this with his eyes open in battle, as Lyassa has forcefully told him more than once, but it doesn’t mean that he can do it right now. And he needs more practice.

“ _Do you see it? How deep the red of its scales is? How deep the black outlines of the scales_?”

Harry nods again, slowly. The image appears clearer and sharper as he concentrates, and he _is_ concentrating hard. Sweat slips down his forehead, and his breathing has sped up to the point that it sounds harsh and hoarse in his own ears.

“ _Good. Now I want you to let the image of the snake go as hard as you can._ ”

Harry whips towards the center of the rug near the hearth where he and Lyassa have been practicing the fiercer magic that comes from the Speakers’ knowledge of Parseltongue. Harry’s got very good at the spell to repair it.

Not that he’s needed the repair charm much for the aftereffects of _this_ spell. He still hasn’t mastered it—

But then that doesn’t matter, as he watches the sharp image of black-and-red fire burst into being in the center of the rug. It only burns there for a moment, shearing the air apart, transforming the rug into a maelstrom of fiery serpent. Then Harry loses his grip on it, and the fire winks out, and the rug is smoldering and Harry is sitting on the floor, even though he doesn’t remember dropping.

“ _You made one like me_!”

Lion is bouncing in place on Harry’s shoulder, his wings fanning the air. Harry strokes his side for a second, and yawns, weariness sweeping through his body. “ _Not like you. It didn’t have wings._ ”

“ _But it’s real! It blazed in the world! Like me_!”

Harry stares at Lion, and then turns back to Lyassa, who’s in her half-human form, swaying quietly as she looks down at the burn in the rug with a slight smile on her face. “ _What does he mean? I thought the serpents that you’ve been teaching me to conjure were all real_?”

Lyassa looks up at him, her tail rustling for a moment and making the usual rasping noise it does on the stone floor not covered by the rug. “ _He means that you were creating a possible permanent effect. The serpents you conjure come from nothing and go back to nothing when you’re done with them. The serpent that you’re learning to form now, when you’re more adept at it, will transform anyone and anything it touches into a fiery serpent, and it will last. You can take them as pets, or put them out with water if you want, but they will not simply fade when you have no more need of them, any more than Lion does._ ”

Harry opens his mouth, then closes it. He thought he was learning to fling fire, which he didn’t mind, because it’s a pretty good battle tactic. He didn’t know that what he was learning was essentially a form of wandless battle Transfiguration.

“So I can turn people into fiery _snakes_ with this?” he demands, ignoring the disappointed way Lyassa looks at him for lapsing into English. “Not just—set them on fire?”

“ _Yes, if that is what you want to do._ ”

“ _But it just burns a hole in the rug. It doesn’t turn the rug into anything._ ”

“ _It will, once you have learned to hold the serpent in the world._ ” Lyassa slithers towards him and bends down, studying him carefully, looking into first one eye and then the other. “ _Are you quite well? You sound as though you are dazed and have hit your head on something. Do you need a glass of water_?”

“ _I’m really bloody tired._ ” Harry flops back on the floor and stares at the ceiling for a second. No, he didn’t think that he was doing something that complicated.

A red blur appears in front of his eyes, and Harry blinks and adjusts his glasses so that he’s looking through them. It’s a piece of meat that looks almost raw. He glares at Lyassa.

“ _I took it from the sandwich you didn’t eat earlier,_ ” Lyassa says. “ _It’s cooked. Eat. You’ve been exhausting yourself, and I thought you were braced for the amount of effort required and had decided you didn’t need the food, but I was wrong._ ”

Harry scowls, but it’s true that she was wrong, and only because he didn’t understand what he was doing. He picks up the piece of meat and bites into it. The minute it touches his tongue, he starts devouring it, and only nods his thanks when Lyassa brings over the entire plate of sandwiches.

“ _Why did you not eat earlier_?”

Harry shrugs and inhales most of the next sandwich before he replies. “ _I didn’t know it was wandless Transfiguration and would take this much energy._ ”

“ _But you have neglected to eat before. This is not the first time it has happened in our training._ ”

Harry blinks at her over the heel of something that might be an apple. He’s honestly chewing it too fast to tell. “ _It’s the first time that I fell back on the floor from doing a spell. And I_ would _have been more prepared if you’d told me it was wandless Transfiguration._ ”

“ _But you have burned up reserves that did not allow you to keep standing on your feet. You staggered and reached for support._ ”

Lyassa doesn’t even follow that up with her usual paean to why it’s a good thing to have a serpent tail instead of legs, which worries Harry. He frowns as he slows down and manages to taste the fruit he’s eating. Yes, it’s an apple. “ _And you think I need more than that in order to use this magic in battle._ ”

“ _Do you want to die a stupid death because you ran out of strength in the middle of a fight_?”

Harry sighs and spends a few more minutes eating, at least until the hole in his stomach no longer feels as if the rest of his body is intending to collapse into it. He leans back, stares up at the ceiling, and intones, “ _No._ ”

“ _Then pace yourself. Do not stay up so late at night studying. Do not try to learn so many battle techniques in a day._ ”

Harry clenches his fists. “ _It was only sheer luck that Voldemort didn’t kill me or Sirius when he attacked Grimmauld Place. I_ need _to train._ ”

“ _Not this intensely._ ”

“ _The worry that comes when I don’t would kill me more effectively than exhaustion._ ” Harry snaps.

“ _I don’t think you mean effectively. I think you mean efficiently. In the end, no matter if something kills you more slowly than other things, it will kill you._ ”

Harry lets out the kind of shrill laugh that he doesn’t utter much anymore in the presence of the Speakers. He buries his head in his hands, and Lyassa reaches out and touches his shoulder with her hand that feels like small scales or beads are buried underneath the skin. Her nails scratch gently at him for a moment.

“You are not dead yet,” she says in English, which Harry knows is a concession. “You can afford to rest and eat and trust in your guardians and us to protect you enough to do both those things.”

Harry breathes out slowly. It’s—hard to do that, but easier than it would have been before he saw Sirius’s void magic. He does trust that some of the people he loves can protect themselves more effectively than he thought they could.

_Effective, rather than efficient._

Maybe this is enough to destroy part of his conviction that he’s the only one who can protect the people around him. Harry knows himself well enough to suspect that it hasn’t gone completely.

“All right,” he says quietly.


	13. Defense Against the Dark Arts

Harry sits at the Slytherin table, staring towards the head one, where Dolores Umbridge is squatting in her chair, squinting and blinking and nodding at everyone. Harry’s too far away to really see what the look in her eyes is when she turns her head towards him, but he’s _sure_ that it’s not complimentary.

 _So much for staying well-fed,_ he thinks, even as he knows that Lyassa and the others would never accept Umbridge as an excuse for skipping meals. He stabs his fork against his empty plate and leans back against his chair, staring as the new first-years stumble in through the doors.

“You’re going to make them scared to Sort into Slytherin,” Draco mutters from a few seats down.

Harry opens his mouth to snap back, and then shuts it firmly and tries to moderate his scowl. Draco’s not someone Harry can talk to easily, even now, but it’s true that he doesn’t want to scare helpless little firsties.

Zacharias Smith stands up and saunters across the Great Hall towards him. Harry blinks. As far as he knows, it’s a tradition that everyone stays at their House tables until the Sorting is finished.

Umbridge seems to think so, too. She titters, and then snaps, “Where are you going, young man?”

Some of the students flinch. Harry thinks it’s probably just at the sound of her voice, but maybe it’s the contrast between her laughter and her harsh words a second later.

He wouldn’t have thought that way, last year, when he had Chaos beside him.

He reaches down and clutches Chaos’s firestone in his robe pocket. Lion hisses gently and rubs his wing against Harry’s cheek.

Zacharias just glances over his shoulder, says, “The Slytherin table, Professor,” and keeps walking. Harry wonders if Umbridge knows who he is, or who she might just have insulted. Of course, she might not care even if she did, he thinks, taking a quick look at her. Umbridge’s eyes are narrowed and glittering, and her smile seems to have congealed on her face.

Zacharias leans his elbow on the table next to Harry and stares at him expectantly. “So, what’s the plan?”

“What do you mean?” Harry asks. Draco shifts as if he wants to say something, but Zacharias glances at him, and he doesn’t.

“What’s the plan to make this place better?” The flicker of Zacharias’s eyes and tilt of his chin leaves no doubt what he means, although Harry supposes that not using Umbridge’s name means he can claim a level of plausible deniability.

Harry coughs a little, then sits up when he sees Zacharias still staring at him. “I’m working on it.”

“Ah. Mysterious and impressive to some people, but not to everyone.” This time, Zacharias gives him a thin smile and turns around to face the Hufflepuff table. Harry thinks most people would miss the way his fingers jab, pointing, under the table, aiming at some of the Ravenclaws and a few of the Hufflepuffs.

And a few of the Gryffindors.

Harry grimaces. Well, with the fact that Voldemort’s back and a lot of people not wanting to believe it, he knew that he couldn’t count on his old House supporting him completely.

It still hurts.

“I know,” he says. “And I appreciate you coming over to talk to me about it. But I think we’re going to have some gore on our hands from an exploding head if you don’t go back to your table.” In fact, Professor McGonagall is also glaring at Zacharias from where she’s herding in the first-years, a chore she apparently didn’t want to give up to anyone else even though she’s Headmistress now.

“That’s an image,” Zacharias mutters, and then sighs wistfully. “Well. Rest assured that you’ll have the full story about the head’s owner in a few days.” He nods to Harry and wanders off so that he blocks Umbridge’s view of the first-years for a second. Harry has no idea if that’s deliberate or not.

He sits back with a sigh. There were dangers over the summer, sure, but he finds that he’d rather deal with Pettigrew trying to sneak into Grimmauld Place than all the subtleties and politics that happen around him in Hogwarts.

*

“Who’s that letter from, Draco?”

Draco glances up and glares at Theo. Theo only looks back at him, not blinking. Draco doesn’t think it’s his imagination that Theo’s eyes are reflecting the firelight like a cat’s. He’s certainly draped around the chair near the common room fire like one.

A _big_ cat.

But then, Draco knows about Theo’s Animagus training. And while he thinks the last thing the psychotic bastard needs is to know how to turn into a leopard, it’s happening, and no one would listen to him if he tried to argue his point-of-view.

“You don’t need to know,” Draco retorts, and tucks the parchment away. “Aren’t you the one who said that you weren’t ready to be my friend anymore, unless I did something ridiculous that you think is necessary to apologize to your _lord_? There’s no reason for me to pay attention to you.”

“I don’t think I made a declaration like that.” Theo stretches himself and drapes his arm around the back of the chair. “Not as such. There may have been others, though. And need I remind you what happened the _last_ time you thought you could trust your own wisdom?”

Draco’s face flushes. “Shut up.”

“Need I remind you? Or do you remember?”

Draco stands up and retreats to their bedroom without speaking. At least Theo seems bound by some declaration Harry issued, which means that he doesn’t follow Draco and poke at him. He only turns his head to watch him go, eyes still glowing with that flat yellow-orange shine from the fire.

On his bed, he draws the curtains and stares, again, at the letter from Hecuba Selwyn. She says that she knows ways to get around the declaration that seals off Malfoy Manor from him, ways to convince the house-elves to obey him the way they _should_ when he’s their rightful owner.

And the temptation throbs in his heart and hands, breaking like a wave against the memory of what did happen the last time he trusted his own evaluation of someone.

Draco closes his eyes, and makes no decision, and knows he will have to.

*

_I have done as I promised._

Dolores bows her head to the shadow of the great leopard that strides back and forth along the wall. “Yes, you did, powerful one,” she whispers. “You secured the post of Defense Against the Dark Arts professor for me. And will you not yet tell me how I may prepare the sacrifice I will offer you?”

The shadow stops pacing, and for a second, the tail twitches. Dolores holds still. She knows that mortal cats do that when they see prey, but she can only hope that she is not the prey, herself. She doesn’t think she is. She has done exactly what the creature asked of her.

But when making bargains with powers beyond the mortal plane, that is not always enough.

 _We must have a test,_ the creature says, its voice flowing out from the wall as if slinking. _I do not know the powers of this Harry Potter or how he might resist. He has already resisted one attack I thought would—catch him._

Dolores restrains her curiosity. She is to serve, not ask questions, so that someday she might be one that others serve.

“Very well,” she says quietly. “I can set up a test for him in class. What do you want me to do?”

*

Harry is trying to calm down as he walks into the Defense classroom. He knows that his state of high alertness is driving Lion into a hissing frenzy and making Theo and Blaise’s nerves worse. Even Millicent Bulstrode is edging away from him as though she fears infection with his fear.

Or his anger. Or his caution. There are so many emotions blended in him that Harry can’t even name them all. That is _not_ helping him calm down.

He takes a seat in the middle of the classroom, a row of desks that the other Slytherins place themselves in an odd arrangement around, almost a half-circle. Not a full circle, at least, which would have increased Harry’s feeling of being trapped. He stares towards the front of the classroom, and catches Umbridge’s eye.

She gives him a little smirk and waves her wand. The writing that appears on the board is delicate and feminine and seems to consist mostly of curlicues. It says, _Defense Against the Dark Arts, Professor Dolores Umbridge. MINISTRY-APPROVED CURRICULUM._

Harry swallows and finally manages to dislodge the stone in his throat. He gives Hermione a nervous, grateful smile as she settles into the seat right in front of him. Ron has to sit further away because the other chairs are filled with Slytherins, but he catches Harry’s eye and nods.

The other students file in, but Umbridge doesn’t speak until there’s been no one new entering for at least two minutes. Then she stands and smooths down her pink cardigan. There’s a necklace of pearls around her neck, Harry sees, and she seems to have pearls embedded in the haft of her wand.

“As you can see,” Umbridge says in her soft voice that sounds to be a moment away from a titter, “I am your new Defense professor, Madam Dolores Umbridge. We will be following a new curriculum in this class, one the Ministry has approved. You might have been puzzled about the lack of a Defense book in the shops? I have it for you.”

She gestures with her wand, and books shoot out of a pile beside her desk and unfurl themselves onto all the student desks like a stack of playing cards. Harry blinks down at his. It’s by someone called Slinkhard, and says, _Defensive Magical Theory_ on the cover.

“Slinkhard’s book is the essence of Defense,” Umbridge says. Harry can feel her eyes pressing especially hard on the side of his head, but he doesn’t look up to meet them. Instead, he flips through the pages of the book, which—

Appear to have no spells in them.

Hermione’s already noticed the same thing, of course, from the way her hand shoots up. Umbridge ignores her for a moment to talk about the “essence” of Defense, which sounds awfully like “Shut up and do what the Ministry tells you.” Then she turns and nods to Hermione with a small, put-upon sigh.

“Miss Granger?”

“Yes, Professor.” Hermione leans forwards a little. “I couldn’t help noticing that there don’t seem to be spells in this book.” She shakes the Slinkhard thing, which is the most disrespectfully Harry has ever seen her treat a book.

“You have a keen eye for a Muggleborn, Miss Granger,” Umbridge purrs.

Hermione’s face cools and turns red at the same instant, but she just says distantly, “Thank you, Professor. Why are there no spells in the books?”

“Why would you need to learn them?” Umbridge raises her eyebrows. “It’s much more important to learn the habits of right thought. You don’t have to go out and fight in a war. Defensive—and offensive—spells are for trained people in the Ministry like Aurors, who are, after all, paid to do a dangerous and dirty job. Why would you need to do them?”

Seamus, who has been giving Harry uneasy glances since they returned to Hogwarts, is the next one to speak up, unexpectedly. “But we have to take our OWL’s at the end of the year!” he blurts. “How can we pass ‘em without some knowledge of defensive spells, Professor?”

“Oh, I have nothing against self-study, Mr. Finnigan.” Umbridge stares for a moment at Seamus as if he’s a bug she found on the bottom of her shoe. “I’m sure that you’ll manage to impress the proctors if you…work hard.”

“And what will we do in class, if we’re not practicing spells?” Ron demands. “Professor Umbridge,” he adds after a second of her staring at him with those two small eyes like she’s a boar about to charge.

“Read,” Umbridge says, with a long, slow smile. “There will be no need to talk. Read at least the first two chapters of Slinkhard, and more if you can manage it.” She turns and walks up and sits behind her desk, but Harry doesn’t think it’s his imagination that she’s leaning forwards a little, as if waiting for something to happen.

Hermione puts her hand up again. Umbridge ignores her, but turns her head slightly, as if to see past the barrier that Hermione’s arm makes, and yes, Harry is certain now. She’s watching _him_ , waiting for—what? Some outburst?

Harry sees no reason to oblige her. He flips open the first page of Slnkhard, reads the paragraph which says Dementors are no threat to anyone because they’re only used to keep the _guilty_ criminals of Azkaban under control, and snorts.

“Something you wanted to say, Mr. Potter?”

Harry looks up and shakes his head. “No, Professor, I have no questions.” He glances at Hermione, and so does Umbridge, but she doesn’t seem inclined to call on her. Hermione switches to her left arm.

Harry, meanwhile, pulls a book on curses that Sirius gave him out of his bag and starts to read it.

“Mr. Potter.”

Harry glances up as Umbridge skulks away from her desk and comes to stand right beside his. It’s not easy to control his instincts that want to cast at her, or ignore Lion, who’s hissing about how he wants to fly into her face and bite her. “Yes, Professor?”

“I can’t help noticing that you are not reading Slnkhard,” Umbridge says, and there’s a note under her voice that sounds like excitement.

“Oh, but I am, Professor Umbridge.” Harry nods to the Slinkhard book still open on his desk. “I’m comparing this other book to it. I’m interested in seeing what their different Defense philosophies are.”

Umbridge narrows her eyes. “I did not tell you that you could do that, Mr. Potter.”

“But you said that we should read Slinkhard’s book, Professor. I’m just doing this to make sure that I get a greater understanding.” Harry widens his eyes innocently, and ignores the way that Lion is whispering insults on his shoulder and his image of Sirius is laughing in the back of his head.

“That isn’t a Defense book.” Umbridge steps around to the side as if she wants to get a look at the title or cover of the book. Harry tilts it a little so that she can see the ancient gold-flaked lettering, and smiles up at her.

“It’s a book on the philosophy and history of Defensive spells, Professor. And offensive spells.”

“It is not.” And Umbridge reaches out to take it.

Harry can never really recall afterwards if he intended to move it out of her way or not. The point is that he doesn’t, and her palm brushes the cover of the book, and a second later she’s staggering backwards, clutching her blackened hand and giving a muted sound that’s a half-howl.

“Oh. I wonder why it did that?” Harry frowns at the book, then shakes his head. “Sorry, Professor. That must be because it’s a book from the library at Grimmauld Place, and my godfather probably put a spell on it to keep anyone he doesn’t want to touch it from touching it.”

“You _wounded_ me, Mr. Potter!” Umbridge sounds far more shaken than Harry thinks a little thing like a burned palm is worth. Then again, if she doesn’t face physical pain on a daily basis, maybe she takes it more seriously when something happens.

“Sorry, Professor.” Harry does his best to look contrite. “I really didn’t know the book would do that.”

“ _Detention_ ,” Umbridge snarls. “Tomorrow night, at eight-o-clock.” She looks around the classroom and seems to meet everyone’s eyes, although Harry doubts she does. “Go back to reading Slinkhard! And Mr. Potter, put that book away _right now_!”

Harry didn’t really expect to get away with studying the book for long, so he shrugs and puts it back in his satchel. And then he bends his head over Slinkhard and pretends to read.

And pretends that he can’t feel the sheer hatred with which Umbridge is staring at him.

*

_You said you would set something up that would give me an opportunity to taste his blood and power._

“I’m sorry.” Dolores sits with her head bowed and her hand in a bowl of soothing unguent on her desk in her office. She did intend to make Potter spill his blood, and then her master could have learned from it how strong his magic was. She never counted on being injured herself.

_I ought to destroy you._

Dolores bows further and gets very tense as the leopard’s shadow stops pacing on the wall in front of her. She knows that she can do nothing if the great creature decides to kill her. That is the price of calling up more-than-mortal creatures and making bargains with them.

Nothing except remind the leopard of what she might be able to offer.

“It is your right to do so,” she murmurs, and can’t remember the last time she sounded so calm and meek. “But you would need someone else to bring you to a foothold in this world, my master, and perhaps you would not find someone for another generation.”

 _And this Harry Potter is the best prey I have seen in many of those generations._ The shadow turns on the wall, its tail coiling briefly around its flanks for a moment as though to brush away annoying flies. Then the leopard’s head turns towards her. _You have another chance._

Dolores holds back the joyful squeak that would make her sound too much like a little girl, and bows her head. “Yes, master?”

_The detention. You will draw his blood during that. I do not care what you must do to accomplish it. I will be within the shadows, and I demand blood._

Dolores breathes out on the rush of relief. “It will be done.”


End file.
